Egbu

I was going to title this post "English," but I felt that "Egbu" better expressed what I feel. I just came back from a Classics talk, about a theory of self-liberation by slaves in ancient Athens. So what I'm thinking about is, in title-form, The Mundane in Poetry.

Doesn't it make you crazy when you're reading a poem, and you come across a really great line--absolutely beautiful poetry--and you want to find an excuse to quote it, but then you realize that the topic in question is the literary equivalent of toejam and there's no way a situation will come up in which it could be appropriate to quote that line?

I hate that.