The world is pushing us—this is what Dylan Thomas’s famous "The Force That through the Green Fuse" is saying. Is the world present in us every moment? is a question that arises from the Thomas poem. How are chemistry, biology, psychology, even botany a constant part of us? To see the world in us, the world as self, is an aspect of romanticism; and so "The Force That through the Green Fuse" is romantic. But the question we have most to be accurate about is how the world of all time, the world in all its width now, the world gigantic and atomic, should be looked at by us, even as we are impelled by it. How, in other words, are we free, can we be free, as we are pushed by what begins in time, is present in all space? The first stanza of the poem has the most power, the most grace in power; yet the other stanzas likewise give the feeling of the world driving, driving and resting, resting in us.

                                                                                                                                                               —Eli Siegel

From "Poetry: The Criticism of Self, " a Terrain Gallery Presentation, August, 1965.