Unmistakable Winter
When icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen in the pail . . .
And Marian's nose looks red and raw . . .
That was Shakespeare's vivid presentation of unmistakable winter. You don't need to make the generalisation if you give the particular instances. A poet is like a Sherlock Holmes, assembling the phalanx of data from which to draw his editorial conclusion. William James' notion was of "the solidity of specificity." Kerouac's phrase for it was "Details are the life of prose." To have it you've got to have "direct treatment of the thing." And that requires direct perception --- mind capable of awareness, uncluttered by abstractions, the veil of conceptions parted to reveal significant details of the world's stage.

--- From "Meditation and Poetics"
The Essential Ginsberg
Michael Schumaker, Eitor
© 2015 Harper Perennial
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