The Death of Heart

Elizabeth Bowen famously wrote The Death of the Heart (1938).  But remember Tradition and the Individual Talent, the essay which  argued for the impersonality of the artist. Never mind that The Four Quartets were a thinly veiled work of autofiction relating to the failure of Eliot's marriage. Your recommendation to yourself not to write from the heart may derive from questions of prosody. Do you really want the lingua franca of your poem to be the pain of love, "Pasio" in Latin is "suffering." "Leidenschaft" is Tristan and Isolde's experience, but if you listen to Wagner's "Prelude" (repeated ad nauseam Lars von Trier's Melancholia), it connotes the romantic agony of Heidegger's Sein-zum-tode, Being-towards-death. Writing from the heart leads to sententiousness and hyperbole, but then where to find the words? Answer: write with "fingers," the royal road to the unconscious.

read "_RT" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star