It’s not often that you’ll hear a poet say of himself, “I count myself as a mediocre poet,” as James Matthew Wilson does in this wonderful essay about the joy of writing in traditional forms. That joy comes from the sense of participation in a project too big to be completed in one lifetime. I can’t help chiming in with a line from my own poem, “Elegy for Everyone”: “The things that matter always take forever.” Here’s a link to Wilson’s essay.
