Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.
To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.
It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.
The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.
There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.