Life & Mortality Quote by Richard Eberhart

Eberhart frames poetry as a kind of secular magic: not the childish wish to beat death, but the adult tactic of arguing with it in public. Calling poems "spells" admits the obvious weakness of art (it can't resurrect anyone) while insisting on its quieter power: it can keep an inner life from evaporating on schedule. The line works because it refuses grand metaphysics and sticks to a practical miracle. A poem is a milestone, a marker you can return to and measure yourself against. That metaphor turns memory into geography; the self becomes a traveler who needs proof that the earlier version existed at all.

The subtext is anxiety disguised as craft advice. "Perpetuate your feelings, to establish them" suggests that feelings are unstable until they're given form - that emotion, unrecorded, is basically rumor. Eberhart isn't praising confession for its own sake; he's describing how art converts private weather into something with edges, something that can be recognized by strangers later. It's also a warning: if you can't translate your experience into the "central heart" of human feeling, you don't get the afterlife poetry offers.

Context matters: Eberhart lived through the 20th century's mass death, then watched literary fashions cycle past him into a new century. His claim to survival isn't about celebrity. It's about resonance. Touch the durable nerve endings - grief, desire, fear, tenderness - and the work outlasts the body, not because it's immortal, but because readers keep reanimating it.