Speaking of Dante, Charles Williams once pointed out how consistently he began with “the common thing,” with particular, local details he himself had witnessed. No matter how high into greater meanings his vision ascended, it always originated in “the girl in the street, the people he knew, the language he had learned as a child.”
This ought to seem too obvious to mention. After all, where else should a poet begin? Yet these days, when I name certain writers among those under fifty (i.e. the young), what I know is missing from all their books are just these particulars. They all make adequate sentences. They all have some originality of vision. But they know so little about the substance life uses to happen with, their senses have apprehended so few of the sights and sounds, smells and textures, rhythms and rituals, of the incarnated world, that their books seem like theorems. It is as though God, with the idea of Adam in mind, had not been able to lay His hands on enough dust to embody him.
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