As a teenager and college student, fear of cultural inadequacy was a powerful motivator for me, and I suspect it was a major factor in my initial adoption of certain intellectual habits that have since become constant features of my life. One of these is reading poetry, which I first began to do self-consciously, and maniacally, some time in late high school.
As with many of the obsessions we decide upon at that age, I at first -- and for a long time -- derived no intrinsic joy from it. A vast portion of the poetry I consumed meant nothing at all to me. Nor could I figure out why exactly it seemed to mean something to other people -- I just knew that it did, and that it would be a shameful sign of inferiority if I confessed that I did not have the same reactions. The advice of the critics, who claimed to find mysterious resonances in sounds and meters, rather than what was actually being said, was of no use. I never could hear whatever it was they were talking about -- and for the most part I still can't.
