Alice Van Wart is a writer and teaches literature and writing in the Department of Continuing Education at theUniversity of Toronto. She has published two books of poetry and has written articles on modern and contemporary literature. In the following essay, Van Wart examines the sensitivity and intellect of the poet expressed in the poem.

Born in 1947, Kenyon's life was cut short by cancer in 1995. Throughout much of her life she suffered the crippling effects of a clinical depression, the shadow of which hovers over much of her poetry and accounts for a consistent theme in it: the redemption of suffering through an appreciation of beauty in the world of art and music and, most particularly, in the natural world. In a poem titled "Having It Out With Melancholy," Kenyon, experiencing a moment of intense happiness at her awareness of the beauty in life, rhetorically asks, "What...