Friday, two parties, one on a rooftop. Yesterday, “Animula” in Parallel Octave, and the Baltimore Book Festival. Today, chakra-balancing yoga and more of Eliot’s prose: which, unlike his poetry, grows more and more congenial to me as he ages. Also, finishing the poem (finishing the hat). The late Eliot is helpful in this regard. Encouraging.

“When a man is engaged in work of abstract thought — if there is such a thing as wholly abstract thought outside the mathematical and the physical sciences — his mind can mature, while his emotions either remain the same or only atrophy, and it will not matter. But maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one’s age, and with the same intensity of the emotions of youth.”

-T.S. Eliot, from “Yeats,” (Selected Prose: 247-8)