Longing, We Say, Because Desire Is Full

It Was One Of The Great Mass Achievements Of American Civilization, And We Did It Because We Thought If You Were Going To Have A Democratic Form Of Government, People Had To Be Able To Read And Understand Complicated Ideas On Their Own.

At Some Level, You Have To Be Able To Say, "this Is My Task." It's In Small, Local Ways That You Keep Yourself Alive And Refresh Ideas That Are Always Going Into Dead Abstraction.

One Of The Interesting Things About The History Of Poetry In The 16th, 17th, And 18th Centuries Is That People Who Read Liked Getting Their Information In Rhyme Just As Much As In Prose. The Genre That We Would Think Of As Nonfiction Often Was Written In Verse In Forms Like The Georgic When People Thought That One Of The Tasks Of Poetry Was Conveying Arguments And Information In A Pleasant Way.

Where Politics Is Concerned, I Think Poets Have To Be Pragmatists, Philosophical Pragmatists.

I Think It's True To Say That In 1973 I Could Read Every Book Of Poems That Was Published In A Year, And I Did.