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I do think free will is sewn into everything we do; you can’t cross a street, light a cigarette, drop saccharine in your coffee without really doing it. Yet the possible alternatives that life allows us are very few, often there must be none. I’ve never thought there was any choice for me about writing poetry…But asking you is THE might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had.
Robert Lowell, in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop about proposing marriage, dated August 15, 1957