SOURCE: Spirko, Robert. “Affective Disorders: The Treatment of Emotion in Jane Kenyon's Poetry.” In Bright Unequivocal Eye: Poems, Papers, and Remembrances from the First Jane Kenyon Conference, edited by Bert G. Hornback, pp. 121-26. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.

In the following essay, Spirko examines the techniques Kenyon uses to express and control emotion in her poetry.

… I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can. .....What we feel most has           no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds. 

—“The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart,” by Jack Gilbert

It is a common myth that poets are somehow more sensitive, that their souls are somehow more finely tuned than those of “normal people.” If this is true, and I'm not sure that it is, I think it has more to do with poetry than with poets. Let me be more clear. Poetry is...