Flight

Before he ever wrote a word, Lloyd Mifflin held a brush. Trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and in the studios of Germany, he spent years translating the visible world onto canvas until he became convinced the fumes were poisoning him. So he did something radical: he abandoned the physical for the purely imaginative. He turned to poetry, eventually authoring over 500 sonnets. Flight, drawn from the 1897 collection The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics, captures this transcendence. These are poems about escape into beauty, about the soul taking wing beyond the material and into realms of pure thought and feeling. Mifflin's verse moves with the precision of a painter who learned that some visions cannot be captured in pigment alone. The language here is heightened, musical, steeped in the Romantic tradition that valued intuition over logic. For readers who believe poetry is a form of flight, a departure from the ordinary into something luminous and lasting.