stanza my stone

"The difficulty displaced, the heroic energy diffused in merely living a life, is an incalculable quality. It is pointless, finally, to say that Poe or Hart Crane might have survived longer or written differently had either been born under a better star or lived in more encouraging circumstances. […] Of course, circumstances (gender, color, education, the sense of belonging to a literary tradition) did make it possible for both Poe and Hart Crane to create work which has not only survived, but has remained part of literary history. The question is really, not what else ‘might have’ happened to Poe or Crane, but what did happen to the numberless poets who were born as women, or black slaves, or into other economic and intellectual deprivation?"

— Adrienne Rich, “The Tensions of Anne Bradstreet”