Poetry Cannot Afford To Lose Its Fundamentally

I Suppose I Did Feel A Certain Public Pressure Always.

The Completely Solitary Self: That's Where Poetry Comes From, And It Gets Isolated By Crisis, And Those Crises Are Often Very Intimate Also.

Wherever That Man Went, He Went Gratefully.

Anything Can Happen Is Also, Incidentally, A Poem That Arose From Teaching. I'd Talked About The Horace Ode (i, 34) [on Which The Poem Is Based] In A Lecture I Gave At Harvard In The Fall Of 2000 Entitled Bright Boltsand Remembered It After The Twin Towers Attack.

It Is Difficult At Times To Repress The Thought That History Is About As Instructive As An Abattoir; That Tacitus Was Right And That Peace Is Merely The Desolation Left Behind After The Decisive Operations Of Merciless Power.