...Robinson Jeffers's Medea...sort of like Howl
redone by Webster or Tourneur... I was able to understand
a little of the mental state of Plath's last days, when I realized
her emotional situation was exactly analogous to Medea's....

G--- the Communist called, too... As usual I waffled out. He
did say something which stuck in my mind: "Don't let that
illegitimist night get you down." I realized my position vis-à-vis
the Party has been (sometimes) like those 19c. dandies who
sort of maintained an aesthetic interest in Catholicism, without
ever managing to summon enough faith to want to join.

"Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only
expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light
of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the
world's experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely
a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed,
the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness; and she saw,
with a dreadful reluctance, why this effort was so rare. Reluctantly,
because she then realized that Richard had bitterly disappointed her
by writing a book in which he did not believe. In that moment she
knew, and she knew that Richard would never face it, that the book
he had written to make money represented the absolute limit of his
talent. It had not really been written to make money--if only it had
been! It had been written because he was afraid, afraid of things
dark, strange, dangerous, difficult, and deep." --James Baldwin,
Another Country (1962)

"He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be,
forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any
stranger. Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination
does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown
precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a
mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment."
--ibid

My religious roots are not so much in Christianity as in Rock--
& only the corruption of the latter fills me with a sense of betrayal.

A poem is a bug like a cricket.