In short, the good old quaint ways should be abandoned. There should be a nationwide distribution of poetry, classic and contemporary. It should be handled privately, I suppose, but supported by the state. The age group it should be aiming at is fifteen and up. The emphasis should be on the American classics; and as to who or what should be printed, that should be decided by a body of two or three people in the know, that is, by the poets. The academics, with their ideological bickering, should be kept out of it, for nobody has the authority to prescribe in this field on any grounds other than taste. Beauty and its attendant truth are not to be subordinated to any philosophical, political, or even ethical doctrine, since aesthetics is the mother of ethics and not the other way around. Should you think otherwise, try to recall the circumstances in which you fall in love.
What should be kept in mind, however, is that there is a tendency in society to appoint one great poet per period, often per century. This is done in order to avoid the responsibility of reading others, or for that matter the chosen one, should you find his or her temperament uncongenial. The fact is that at any given moment in any literature there are several poets of equal gravity and significance by whose lights you can go. In any case, whatever their number, in the end it corresponds to the known temperaments, for it can't be otherwise: hence their differences. By grace of language, they are there to provide society with a hierarchy or a spectrum of aesthetic standards to emulate, to ignore, to acknowledge. They are not so much role models as mental shepherds, whether they are cognizant of it or not—and it's better if they are not. Society needs all of them; and should the project I am speaking of ever be embarked on, no preferences should be shown to any one of them. Since on these heights there is no hierarchy, the fanfare should be equal.
I suspect that society settles just for one, because one is easier to dismiss than several. A society with several poets for its secular saints would be harder to rule, since a politician would have to offer a plane of regard, not to mention a level of diction, matching at least the one offered by poets: a plane of regard and a level of diction which no longer could be viewed as exceptional. But such a society would be perhaps a truer democracy than what we've known thus far. For the purpose of democracy is not democracy itself: that would be redundant. The purpose of democracy is its enlightenment. Democracy without enlightenment is at best a well- policed jungle with one designated great poet in it for its Tarzan.
It's the jungle that I am talking about here, not Tarzans. For a poet to sink into oblivion is not such an extraordinary drama; it comes with the territory: he can afford it. Unlike society, a good poet always has the future, and his poems, in a manner of speaking, are an invitation for us to sample it. And the least—perhaps the best—thing that can be said about us is that we are the future of Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop: to name just a few . . . Every generation living on the earth is the future —more exactly, a part of the future of those who are gone, but of poets in particular, because when we read their work we realize that they knew us, that the poetry that preceded us is essentially our gene pool. This calls not for reverence; this calls for reference.
I repeat: A poet is never a loser; he knows that others will come in his stead and pick up the trail where he left it. (In fact, it's the swelling number of others, energetic and vocal, clamoring for attention, that drive him into oblivion.)
He can take this, as well as being regarded as a sissy. It is society that cannot afford to be oblivious, and it is society that—compared with the mental toughness ofpractically any poet—comes out a sissy and a loser. For society, whose main strength is that of reproducing itself, to lose a poet is like having a brain cell busted. This impairs one's speech, makes one draw a blank where an ethical choice is to be made; or it barnacles speech with qualifiers, turns one into an eager receptacle for demagoguery or just pure noise. The organs of reproduction, however, are not affected.
There are few cures for hereditary disorders (undetectable, perhaps, in an individual, but striking in a crowd), and what I'm suggesting here is not one of them. I just hope that this idea, if it catches on, may slow down somewhat the spread of our cultural malaise to the next generation. As I said, I took this job in the spirit ofpublic service, and maybe being paid by the Library of Congress in Washington has gone to my head. Perhaps I fancy myself as a sort of Surgeon General slapping a label onto the current packaging of poetry. Something like This Way of Doing Business Is Dangerous to the National Health. The fact that we are alive does not mean that we are not sick.
It's often been said—first, I think, by Santayana—that those who don't remember history are bound to repeat it. Poetry doesn't make such claims. Still, it has some things in common with history: it employs memory, and it is of use for the future, not to mention the present. It certainly cannot reduce poverty, but it can do something for ignorance. Also, it is the only insurance available against the vulgarity of the human heart. Therefore, it should be available to everyone in this country and at a low cost.
Fifty million copies of an anthology of American poetry for two dollars a copy can be sold in a country of 250 million. Perhaps not at once, but gradually, over a decade or so, they will sell. Books find their readers. And if they will not sell, well, let them lie around, absorb dust, rot, and disintegrate. There is always going to be a child who will fish a book out of the garbage heap. I was such a child, for what it's worth; so, perhaps, were some of you.
A quarter of a century ago, in a previous incarnation in Russia, I knew a man who was translating Robert Frost into Russian. I got to know him because I saw his translations: they were stunning poems in Russian, and I wanted to become acquainted with the man as much as I wanted to see the originals. He showed me a hardcover edition (I think it was by Holt), which fell open onto the page with "Happiness Makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length." Across the page went a huge, size-twelve imprint of a soldier's boot. The front page of the book bore the stamp stalag #3B," which was a World War II concentration camp for Allied POWs somewhere in France.
Now, there is a case of a book of poems finding its reader. All it had to do was to be around. Otherwise it couldn't be stepped on, let alone picked up.
Letter to a President
Dear Mr. President,
I've decided to write this letter to you because we have something in common: we both are writers. In this line of work, one weighs words more carefully, I believe, than elsewhere before committing them to paper or, for that matter, to the microphone. Even when one finds oneself engaged in a public affair, one tries to do one's best to avoid catchwords, Latinate expressions, all manner of jargon. In a dialogue, of course, or with two or more interlocutors around, that's difficult, and may even strike them as pretentiousness. But in a soliloquy or in a monologue it is, I think, attainable, though, of course, one always tailors one's diction to one's audience.