Kasey wonders what I mean by this centrality. In the obit for the Canadian writer Carol Shields last week, she was quoted as saying that one of her themes was something that she became more aware of with time : the amount of goodness in people & the world. I spoke about it as a basic, almost subliminal social contract; you could just as well call it the "tree of life".

In other words, life itself is the center; without it we shrivel up & fade away. Life is the source of humane values; human beings put them into force by their thoughts & actions. Its centrality is not an ideal construct but a consequence of its absolute necessity.

Poetry is a natural force, a virtu, stemming from this same source. Its verbal actualization could be called Logos (as it was by Philo).