In his essay “How to Think Like a Poet,” Ryan Wilson notes that the ancient virtue of xenia, hospitality to the stranger, applies both to the stranger at our doorstep and to the soul’s reception of the world. “Those whom we love we do not enslave,” he writes. “Art must approach the stranger not with an eye toward enslaving it but with inquisitiveness and delight in it for what it is.” Rather, the true poet knows that we human beings are God’s workmanship—God’s poems.
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