From 'The Nether World'

My mate in London (he knows who he is) always seems to have a pile of new books waiting to be read and I used to envy that. I generally have the one I'm reading, plus maybe a poetry book or magazine and perhaps some lightweight book about racing or something like that. But I'm not used to having four sturdy volumes looking down at me from the shelves, waiting to be read, before I'm very far into George Gissing, with Murakami's memoir about running to gently drift through and Marie Howe's poems which I'm finding difficult to ascertain how much I like.
I'm sure they'd like to be put in the same bracket as Elizabeth Bishop's but I don't think they're quite that. They appear to be anecdotal and thus 'confessional' in a way, with a theme of victimhood and abuse never very far away. And at times they do achieve some almost ironic detachment, but the fascination is more in trying to decide how much I can empathize with their meaning and how much I can admire the art in them. They are American, though, there's no doubt about that.
The advice I decided to follow, from another website, whose list of 'Go-To' poets looked otherwise so immaculate, has been partially successful in that it is at least still interesting to keep reading and see if the penny drops and Marie Howe is inaugurated into the great tradition of American Women poets, like Marianne Moore, Sylvia, Laura Riding, perhaps Adrienne Rich, up to Karen Solie- and I'm sure there are plenty more, if I've missed the point or, as is my best excuse in such circumatances, I simply wasn't part of the demographic target audience for which such poetry was written.

But, with all anxiety aforethought, since yesterday, I have had a stye on my right eye. It's not particularly painful but one has to do something about such things. Boots very nearly sold me some ointment until the girl said, 'you can dab it with a warm, damp flannel or it will probably just go away'. That's what I like to hear.
Okay, then. Thanks. I'll come back and have some of that later if it doesn't.
But it only takes one minor problem with my 110 year old house to make me think that it will soon crumble to a pile of dust and, in the same way, one tiny spot on the underside of one eye makes me extrapolate into the blindness of Milton or Handel - the similarity being in the loss of sight, not the creative genius, and I wonder what would become of me. I couldn't learn braille. I doubt if the books I want to read are available in that format and I can rarely listen to the whole of Poetry Please or A Book at Bedtime without falling asleep and waking up ten minutes into the next, less soporific, programme. So I do realize how thankful we should all be to be able to read, which we take for granted, and I am prompted to think that I ought to seek out poems to write, pro-actively, rather than wait months for them to suggest themselves to me, and produce The Perfect Book sooner rather than later. I adore many of the poems in it so far, which might benefit from some fine editing, but I wouldn't want to have gone blind and not seen it.
And, more importantly, I'd never again be able to find lines like these, from The Nether World, or share them with you. I can't imagine what it would be like to live like that.
The advantage of Mrs. Green's ale was that the very first half-pint gave conscience its bemuddling sop; for a penny you forgot all the cares of existence; for threepence you became a yelling maniac.

And that is why George Gissing is a better writer than Tolkein.