Today, after I write a letter and edit someone else's poetry manuscript and shove bath towels into the dryer, but before I start peeling carrots and potatoes for minestrone, I will be reading Shelley's A Defence of Poetry, which may be my favorite document about poetry. Yes, it's overexcited and sometimes overblown; and, yes, it's too long; and, yes, he probably wrote it while his wife was hundreds of miles away dealing with their dying child. Nonetheless, it's a remarkable essay, and I love it all over again every time I read it. If you are feeling dragged out and disheartened by terrible student work or a trash heap of rejection letters or collegial grumpiness or the inanities of prize-winning versifiers or your own wretched revisions, try reading its final lines. I'm sure you'll feel better.

It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

[P.S. If you want a cheap fried-fish dinner you can't do better than smelts, which cost $4.50 a pound at the grocery. Roll each little fish in seasoned flour, then in egg thinned with a teaspoon of cold water, then in cornmeal. Pour about a quarter cup of peanut oil into a skillet, and heat thoroughly. Fry the fish in batches, 2 or 3 minutes on each side, until they are crispy. Serve with lemon and lots of freshly ground pepper, a green salad, a scoop of cranberry-orange-apple relish, and a warm sliced baguette. You will be happy.]