中西诗理诗论漫谈系列（三）

好诗不是意义贫瘠的段落或课后的例行练习题。好诗有毁灭性的力量，有不可逆转地改变我们的力量。诗中的字并不仅仅是经历或感觉的简单同义词。每一个字本身都有自己的生命 -- 作为声音、作为图像、作为一种引发无数联想的工具。

Dickinson was attempting to describe for her sister-in-law the power of poetry to envelop and even to devastate the reader (or listener). Her physical deion was an effort to convey that successful poems are not effete passages or bookish exercises; they are chillingly annihilating. They have the power to alter us irrevocably.

Poetry, the Belle of Amherst knew, is that form of communication in which words are never simple equivalents of experience or perception. The words themselves, the words as words, have a life as sounds, as images, as the means for generating a series of associations.

By Helen Marie Casey