We Don't Know Our Own Story.

One Thing We Do Know Is That Mass Literacy Is A Product Of The 19th Century, At Least In English-speaking Cultures - Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada, And The U. S.

The Ideal Of Universal Literacy, In The West Anyway, Was First Of All A Protestant Idea - That Everybody Had To Be Able To Read To Save Their Soul. That Idea Got Transposed Into An Idea Of The Importance Of Literacy For Democratic Citizenship.

All The New Thinking Is About Loss. In This It Resembles All The Old Thinking

Imagination Runs Through The Places Where We Live Like Water. We Need Both Things-a Living Knowledge Of The Land And A Live Imagination Of It And Our Place In It- If We Are Going To Preserve It.

I Teach A Lecture Course On American Poetry To As Many As 150 Students. For A Lot Of Them, Its Their Only Elective, So This Is Their One Shot. Theyll Take The Russian Novel Or American Poetry, So I Want To Give Them The High Points, The Inescapable Poets.