Fair enough, Artemesia. There's a conversation you and I could have about the traditional sometimes Victorian eloquence and terms of reference incorporated by Berryman, Plath, their contemporaries-- Williams, too, his love of Sappho, lots of "Asphodel That Greeny Flower" . . . even Ginsberg, I think. Part of the modernist enterprise was incorporating (disguising?) traditional poetic eloquence in new ways. And I hope I conveyed that I am willing to try the thought-experiment of a Slate submission in pentameter couplets, with a description of the sunset in it . . . I like to think that if it were a tenth as good as "Adam's Curse" I would admire it and accept it.

Inkberrow, do you think that the sunset-we-grew-quiet passage is a sort of pre-Raphaelite moment, to any degree? Maybe a more sober return to the relatively comic sighing and "learned looks" and "beautiful old books"?