If you read every poem in every anthology of Greek poetry, you wouldn’t read one poem in which a character of the woman who’s loved is described or matters.
“For me there’s always been big overlap between fiction and song. My style as a novelist comes substantially from what I learnt writing songs. The intimate, first-person quality of a singer performing to an audience, for instance, carried over for me into novels. As did the need to approach meaning subtly, sometimes by nudging it into the spaces between the lines.”
Kazuo Ishiguro