She understood that great literature worked through the imagination to educate the emotions and inform the intelligence of feeling....
Having experienced the effect of her reading voice too many times to count, I gradually saw that professing literature did not consist of saying brilliant things about it, but of taking others into the saving power of imagination. The calling is less to analyze literature or extract concepts from it than to enter the poetic space it creates and experience it whole—whether “it” is the scene in which Achilles and Priam gaze at each other in the last book of the Iliad, or the scene in which Ike McCaslin, at twelve, having left behind his compass and his rifle, encounters Old Ben, and reality, as Melville might say, outruns apprehension.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2022/04/an-apostle-of-literature
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