The Earth Forgives The Previous Year Every

Someone In Ireland Asked Me How Many Republican Poets There Were In The U.s., And I Thought Maybe Two. Maybe There Are 10,000 Poets, And Maybe There Are Two Republicans Among Them.

[osip] Mandelstam, Who Wasn't A Political Thinker, Loved The Idea Of The City-state. One Of The Emblems In His Poetry Of The Politics He Imagined, Over And Against The Universalizing Politics Of [carl] Marx, Was The Medieval City Of Novgorod, Which Had In Its Center A Public Well Where The Water Was Free To Everyone. That Became For Him A Figure Of Justice.

If You're Going To Get Up To Walt Whitman And Robert Frost And Langston Hughes And Sylvia Plath You've Got To Figure Out How You Put People In Possession Of Their Heritage. To Do That You Have To Talk About How They're Being Taught, And The Imagination Of Community The People Who Are Running Our Government Have.

When Emily Dickinson's Poems Were Published In The 1890s, They Were A Best-seller; The First Book Of Her Poems Went Through Eleven Editions Of A Print Run Of About 400. So The First Print Run Out Of Boston For A First Book Of Poems Was 400 For A Country That Had Fifty Million People In It. Now A First Print Run For A First Book Is Maybe 2,000? So That's A Five-time Increase In The Expectation Of Readership. Probably The Audience Is Almost Exactly The Same Size As It Was In 1900, If You Just Took That One Example.

Someone Will Always Want To Mobilize Death On A Massive Scale For Economic Domination Or Revenge. And The Task, Taken As A Task, Appeals To The Imagination. The Military Is An Engineering Profession.