What I love about this book, "Forces of Imagination," is the enthusiasm for the romance of the poetic imagination, combined with the extreme subtlely of perception. One of the few living authors to induce in me a feeling of utter humility and awe. Her level of poetic culture, understanding, is on a whole 'nother level from that of the run-of-the-mill poet. When I read a book of essays by a typical "mainstream" poet, a Donald Hall, say, I am struck by the utter banality of everything he has to say. (His invention of the term "McPoem" is great, but ironical, since it is a perfect description of his own work!)

Behind this entire book stand Mallarmé. Poetry is "un art consacré aux fictions," for example. He is the author most frequently cited by Guest. His phrase about poetry being made of words, much cited recently on various blogs, has often been interpreted in a narrow way. It is not reductionist, anti-visionary, at all, for the word in Mallarmé, in Guest, is haunted:

"The poem is the unburdening of ghosts of the past who have come to haunt the writer exposed to the labyrinth. These are ghosts not words; they are the ephemera that surround and decorate the mind of the poet, a halo rescued from life. And it is the poet's halo that we see arching within the poem, not the full dress of rhyme and structure."

You can't have this sense of haunting, though, through a visionary poetry that simply asserts its vision in straightforward, prosaic words. To have this sense of haunting, language needs to be indirect, symbolist. Thus there can be no a priori "ideas for poems" or "subject matter." This explains Mallarmé's remark, which seems banal only because it is repeated so much. A painter (I forget which one) approached him and said he had many ideas for poems, to which Mallarmé responded: "poems are not made of ideas, but of words." The vision has to be in the words themselves; it is not detachable. Otherwise the greatest visionaries would always be the greatest poets.