If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?
Source:Letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (August 16, 1870); in The Letters of Emily Dickinson (ed. Belknap Press, 1958), Volume II, Letter 342a, Page 473-4
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