Heather McHugh: Verse I was Averse To (January 2016)

Over time, readerly capitance changes, and its own effects can take us by surprise. “Even as we imagine ourselves to be discovering the endless inside the artistic moment,” says Heather McHugh, “the artistic engagement may discover to us the perishabilities within our own tenacities and the utility of our own self-succession.” In this tour-de-force lecture, McHugh reconsiders Blake, Milton, Whitman, and Pound, poets she says she was unable to properly appreciate when she was younger.