Excerpt from The Hazards of Holiness: Poems, 1957-1960 For it does collapse, time and again. I have been writing poetry for thirty years, and despite my failures, I have known this encounter, this appeasement and absolution many times, but only momently. More and more, as the inner core clarifies, as the uses of poetry grope toward the most obscure reductions of the inner being and descend into the darkness below, I see what I felt most dimly from the beginning: such expirations, for all their mo mentary apotheosis, are all anticipatory, they lack finality. These dizzying cancellations, lunging between the defeats of language and the victories of self, are all Stations of the universal Cross, in whose temporal achievement it is not given to rest. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.