“My main thought is that we, being so worldly, so informed, so flooded with motifs from the past, find it more and more difficult to allow any object, whether a snowstorm or a toad or a painting, to… reach the soul.
“The job of the writer [or the painter!] …is to give us a frog or a giant or a snowstorm and to protect it from all the invisible forces that want to delay it, elaborate it, relate it to correct opinions, prevent it from arriving at the soul…
…we recognize that Rembrandt is able to bring the wrinkled face of an old woman right up to our soul.”
Robert Bly from his introduction to “The Best American Poetry 1999”
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