Joan Aleshire: Out of Extremity: Emotion and Conscience (July 1989)

Joan Aleshire considers how literature addressing extremes of human experience must establish a balance between the personal and the universal, the inner and the outer world.

Looking at poems by Bishop, Kunitz, Lowell, Mandelstam, Olds and others, she warns against glorifying or overdramatizing the pain which is a fundamental part of life. At the same time, she argues, with Kafka, that the well-made work of literature wields the power of an ax “to break the frozen sea within us” and deliver us to ourselves.