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William Christie, Emeritus Professor, Australian National University

How do you read a poem? Embrace the sound, the strangeness and the ambiguity

Richard W. Eaker/Shutterstock

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say,

I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

– Emily Dickinson

If someone asked you how you felt and you said you had “a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling was the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air”, your response would be greeted as strange or affected, to say the least.

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