--- ## Highlights When I went home for Christmas, however, I decided to give Milton another go, and took my little Everyman edition with me to the bath. There was something about being immersed in nearly scalding water that took away just enough of my resistance to him. Suddenly, almost like magic, I could flow into the pentameters of Paradise Lost, follow sentences without hesitation as they spilled from one line into another, be swept away by the sheer cascading sound of it. After that, Milton was unlocked. I did not need to be in a bath to read him, I simply had to surrender in the same way, to submerse myself in the rhythm of his language. Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption.” To read Wordsworth’s verse, I had had to imitate the movements of his body as he composed it. But performing Shakespeare meant acting the hard parts too: every line needed an interpretation, because every line had to be delivered with meaning Now that I pay taxes and pluck out my grey hairs, I am convinced that fiction is the more demanding genre. Poetry, the great romance of my pubescent years, feels even more distant, requiring focus and receptivity I can rarely muster. Sometimes I wonder if the young read novels and poems because they are the only ones who can.