For this very reason, however, such poets remain trapped within the old categories. The head sublime, the heart pathos, the genitals beauty, the hands and feet proportion.
Exuberance is beauty.
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. It is gratifying to hear these things once. But it would become tedious if one never heard anything else about the relations between men and women, the darker and more complicated truths that other poets tell. The mistake of all radicalism is to embrace such a differentiation, itself conventional and received, for the sake of transvaluing the conventional values. Sharon Olds believes, unshakably, in a bearded universe.