Repetition Makes Us Feel Secure And Variation

It Seems Like Every Ten Years There's A Book That Says That Poetry Used To Be Popular, And Now It's Not, But We Really Have No Way Of Knowing, In Terms Of Relative Size Of Audience And Other Things, Exactly Who Readers Were.

Poetry, When It Takes Sides, When It Proposes Solutions, Isn't Any Smarter Than Anybody Else.

There's Very Little Solid Research On Readership, Yet People Make Pronouncements About It All The Time.

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.

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.