The Fear Of Poetry Is An Indication

American Poetry Has Been Part Of A Culture In Conflict....we Are A People Tending Toward Democracy At The Level Of Hope; At Another Level, The Economy Of The Nation, The Empire Of Business Within The Republic, Both Include In Their Basic Premise The Idea Of Perpetual Warfare

Everywhere We Are Told That Our Human Resources Are All To Be Used, That Our Civilization Itself Means The Uses Of Everything It Has - The Inventions, The Histories, Every Scrap Of Fact. But There Is One Kind Of Knowledge - Infinitely Precious, Time-resistant More Than Monuments, Here To Be Passed Between The Generations In Any Way It May Be: Never To Be Used. And That Is Poetry.

If We Look Long Enough And Hard Enough ... We Will Begin To See The Connections That Bind Us Together, And When We Recognize Those Connections, We Will Begin To Change The World.

Women In Drudgery Knew They Must Be One Of Four: Whores, Artists, Saints, And Wives. There Are Composite Lives That Women Always Live

Dogma And Shrinking From The External World Are At One Limit Of The Range Of Belief. At The Other Are Science And Poetry And, Indeed, Reality.