On Poetry and Loving

A lovely piece about a pair of contemporary poets, wife and husband.  I liked this bit:

When someone died whom we loved, we went back to the poets of grief and outrage, as far back as Gilgamesh; often I read aloud Henry King’s “The Exequy,” written in the seventeenth century after the death of his young wife. Poetry gives the griever not release from grief but companionship in grief. Poetry embodies the complexities of feeling at their most intense and entangled, and therefore offers (over centuries, or over no time at all) the company of tears.

'Poetry gives the griever not release from grief, but companionship in grief'.  I kind of think that Aristotle would have agreed.