Fact Check

"The world is complete without us. Intolerable fact. To which the poet responds by rebelling, wanting to prove otherwise. Out of wounded vanity or stubborn pride or desolate need, the poet lives in chronic dispute with fact, and an astonishment occurs: another fact is created, like a new element, in partial contradiction to the intolerable. Indelible voice, though it has no impact on the non-human universe, profoundly alters human experience of that universe, as well as of the world of relations, the solitude of the apparently marginal soul."

Louise Gluck, "Best American Poetry 1994: Introduction."