Driving a Pack of Hounds

Most of my students have left for home already. I do have a 6:00 class which I must get to in just a moment--maybe there are one or two students left who need me. In between classes, I've been reading about the poet John Berryman, one of the "confessional" poets I plan to discuss in "From Angst to Art" next semester. In the Introduction to Berryman's collected poems, Charles Thornbury reveals that Berryman was a man of great intensity, even when he read. In a letter to his mother, Berryman describes reading Crime and Punishment:

How shall I tell you how I am reading it? As if I were driving a pack of hounds through a wood, feverishly; only every tree and bush is so unbearably interesting and exciting that I'd like to stop and examine it for a long time, but the hounds are off ahead and won't stop. ... My faculties are raging out in front of me. I haven't felt so powerfully in a long time. Even my unhappiness is acute, sharp, engaging.

Here, I think, Berryman does describe what it feels like to read a great book.