The Ear

Somewhere in his essays, William Gass says that in reply to the foolish question, 'Who do you write for?' he says 'The ear.'
This recurred to mind this week while perusing American Religious Poems: An Anthology, which I had gotten for my mother-in-law and which now served as fresh reading material for me, away from my own books. What a satisfying reading experience it was, and how easily conflicts over different compositional methods -- say, Gjertrud Schnackenburg vs. Michael Palmer -- are subordinated to a similar goal: addressing the pure and perfect Ear.
Even in circles where religious sentiment is taken to be a kind of failure of imagination ("middlebrow"), it's hard to escape the air of transcendence that hovers over literature. I mean, delete the references to God in Annie Dillard and you practically get W.G. Sebald. Yet their audiences probably don't overlap that much.