Now Myles is older than Lowell when he died, and enjoying her greatest moment of accomplishment and fame. Her very presence in the world is a form of activism, but her work, when studied with care, is also political in the sense that it gives evidence of one of the richest and most conflicted human hearts you’re likely to find. When, many years from now, she passes away, may she be elegized rudely by some brat clearing the nettles from her path, just the way she did with Lowell (and, in a more complex gesture, with Schuyler). This kind of schoolyard insult—“The guy was a loon”—is almost hilariously transparent as an expression of desire, and it is part of what the art’s all about.

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