self-returning

Updated: May 10, 2025

And then, of course, we mock our own humiliation, which is another kind of vanity; and, having done this penance, pursue again our self-returning fate. The theme is, after all, one we cannot drop; it is the mortal coil. In the moment of our revulsion from the inevitable return upon itself of the human reason, many of us have clung with the greater desperation to the hope offered by poetry.

Elizabeth Atkins - The Poet's Poet : essays on the character and mission of the poet as interpreted in English verse of the last one hundred and fifty years