Edgar Allen Poe once said, “I was driven insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
I’ve always thought that poets had the most beautiful view of life. They seem to possess the one thing that I’ve always longed desperately for: Clarity.
Some would argue that simply arranging words in order would hardly be considered clarity, but rhyming and patterns do not fall into the definition of poetry for me.
It is about so much more than that.
A crisp fall day can be described as just that. But if you look around for a moment, breathe in air, you don’t even think twice about how each chilled gasp of oxygen enters your lungs.
But there are moments of clarity, when I’m aware of every steady beat against my chest from an organ that can only be explained in scientific terms, when I realize how my senses are so particular that I can feel, smell, and hear the masses that fill the space around me. Knowing that there is life beneath my feet as I trudge through the freshly cut green that has become damp from the rain that has fallen from an endless sky.
A sky we will never reach.
When I notice how everything is so beautifully impossible and unexplainable…
Those are the moments that make a poet.
I’ve always found it interesting that Poe claims to have gone insane from living in sanity, but maybe the complex mind of a poet becomes too overwhelmed by seeing a world filled so much good, and equally as much bad.
Maybe, just maybe, he lost his mind when he let his poetry get consumed by the darkest parts reality instead of the crisp fall days.
Lorelai Losing It 