But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record e…

He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.

Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.