"I'm as impure as the driven, yellow snow." -- Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I sometimes wonder if could write love poetry again. There was a time I did-- years ago, seeming more like eons ago-- and though I can't say any of it particularly good, it came from a part of me that I'm not sure still exists. To write good love poetry, it seems, one has to have a kind of purity that most of us tend to lose, which I think I may have lost some time ago. Purity, perhaps, or innocence, or something to that effect-- a purity that people like WCWilliams, cummings, Millay and Dickinson had but which most of us do not. I do not think Eliot, for example, could have written good love poetry if he tried. Stevens could have. Hardy probably could have but didn't. Coleridge, never. I'm debating whether or not to dredge some old stuff and look at it again-- since I spent much of last night rereading my MA thesis, another work of juvenalia-- to see if that part of me that could write that stuff still exists. Writing love poetry is very different than loving, or even writing about love per se; what that quality is I'm not sure, but once can tell when that quality is present or absent. I wonder if I have it, but I have to admit I'm a tad wary of finding out the answer. Some questions are dangerous.....