My friend Jeff, let's call him Ineluctable Maps' Foreign Correspondent reporting from the magnificent Aegean island of Paros, sent me an email with the subject line, "poetics."

Message:

Captain Benwick was so intimately acquainted with all the tenderest songs of Scott, and all the impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony of Byron; he repeated, with such tremulous feeling, the various lines which imaged a broken heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness, and looked so entirely as if he meant to be understood, that she ventured to hope he did not always read only poetry; and to say, that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.

--Jane Austen, Persuasion