glorious one for the Christian. While some people live lives of quiet despair and others take drastic steps to remove themselves from such despair, poets often find an outlet in describing it. Take Theodore Roethke’s haunting lines, for example: I know the purity of pure despair— my shadow pinned against the sweating wall.3 Others, however, seek to change either the despair-causing situation, or at least their response to that situation. Karl Marx