“Look for a lovely thing and you will find it,” Sara Teasdale said. Indeed. What you see is often not in what is actually there but in . . . what you see.
People are often aggravated by poetry because they “can’t see” what’s in it or they have been taught that they have to look for something in it. But really . . . “look for a lovely thing and you will find it.”
People who see evil in everything are no different from the people who see good in everything. Both can’t see the truth because they are too busy looking for it (or its opposite).
They both have sight corrupted by foresight. Instead, if we relied on insight more often, we would see more lovely things.
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 