The Visiting Wind

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Questions and Answers

What inspired “The Visiting Wind”?

Auden said something about how the only concern of the imagination was with sacred beings and sacred events. If I’m not mistaken, he was explaining Coleridge’s ideas about Primary and Secondary imagination. When I read Auden’s statement it seemed very right to me. I also realized that in my own poems like this one, in my rudimentary way I was trying to enact an attentiveness to exactly that: sacred beings and ongoing sacred events.

What poetic techniques did you use in “The Visiting Wind”?

I used two-like stanzas and ten-syllable lines.


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