Poetry is her religion

My professor for symbolic imagination is so great that I feel really sorry that I don’t love the content of the class more. She is a very teeny-tiny person with big round glasses and big round eyes and an accent that I cannot place but I think is Eastern European (my money’s on Romania. Because it is big.). When she talks about poetry (or critical theory) she looks really uplifted, like she cannot believe how fortunate she is to have this poem available to read and now she is reading it and now she is talking about it and there can never possibly be anything more joyful than this in the world. She also paused in the middle of talking about Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” and said:

“I just cannot resist telling you this. You see yesterday when I was preparing for this class I had my copy of “Ode to the West Wind”, and I had laid out all of my papers in front of me so that I could have some kind of structure for the class–” she spread some papers out in front of her at this point, to show us how it all went down– “and I went to open the window. And I had not yet sat back down in my chair when all my papers have gone flying all over my office.” (She leaned forward a little bit.) “It was the West Wind!” (Sat back to let us absorb this.) “It is true. The wind was from the west yesterday, and although at first I thought, how to say, this is nonsense, I then thought, why am I violating this sacred moment, this mystic moment? For when I put my papers back on my desk, they were in a different order, just the way that poetry is meant to break things down and to reassemble them in a new way. It was–it was the cosmos affirming what I am doing. You see how the human imagination puts meaning into experiences. I could have just closed the window, but no, I found meaning in what was happening.”

It’s such a coincidence because I too had a run-in with the wind yesterday, and I wanted to tell her that the wind and I had had a thing or two to say to each other yesterday, and I had had some grave concerns about the wind’s ability to abide by God’s plan. But I didn’t.