A Word Is Elegy To What It

[osip] Mandelstam, Who Wasn't A Political Thinker, Loved The Idea Of The City-state. One Of The Emblems In His Poetry Of The Politics He Imagined, Over And Against The Universalizing Politics Of [carl] Marx, Was The Medieval City Of Novgorod, Which Had In Its Center A Public Well Where The Water Was Free To Everyone. That Became For Him A Figure Of Justice.

It's Clear That There Has To Be Some Play Between The Vitality Of Invention In Economic Life And Some Regulation Of It, And In Some Ways The Great Ideological Wars Of The 20th Century That Cost So Many Lives Had To Do With Whether To Have Managed Economies Directed By Government Or Economies Directed By The Free Movement Of Capital, Which Is Only Partially Subject To Government Regulation.

If You're Going To Get Up To Walt Whitman And Robert Frost And Langston Hughes And Sylvia Plath You've Got To Figure Out How You Put People In Possession Of Their Heritage. To Do That You Have To Talk About How They're Being Taught, And The Imagination Of Community The People Who Are Running Our Government Have.

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.

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