The Real War Poets Are Always War

The Climate Of Our Culture Is Changing. Under These New Rains, New Suns, Small Things Grow Great, And What Was Great Grows Small; Whole Species Disappear And Are Replaced.

I Decided That Europeans And Americans Are Like Men And Women: They Understand Each Other Worse, And It Matters Less, Than Either Of Them Suppose.

Most Poets, Most Good Poets Even, No Longer Have The Heart To Write About What Is Most Terrible In The World Of The Present: The Bombs Waiting Beside The Rockets, The Hundreds Of Millions Staring Into The Temporary Shelter Of Their Television Sets, The Decline Of The West That Seems Less A Decline Than The Fall Preceding An Explosion.

Nowadays When A Poet With One Privately Printed Book Can Have His Next Three Years Taken Care Of By A Guggenheim Fellowship, A Kenyon Review Fellowship, And The Prix De Rome, It Is Hard To Remember What Chances The Poet Took In That Small-town World, How Precariously Hand-to-mouth His Existence Was. And Yet In One Way The Old Days Were Better; [vachel] Lindsay After A While, By Luck And Skill, Got Far More Readers Than Any Poet Could Get Today.

Both In Verse And In Prose [karl] Shapiro Loves, Partly Out Of Indignation And Partly Out Of Sheer Mischievousness, To Tell The Naked Truths Or Half-truths Or Quarter-truths That Will Make Anybody's Hair Stand On End; He Is Always Crying: "but He Hasn't Any Clothes On!" About An Emperor Who Is Half The Time Surprisingly Well-dressed.