This is a book born of trouble: a troubled mind, a troubled art, troubled times. I am tempted to say my mind, my art, my times, but to say so would be at best a half truth, because the trouble I’m talking about was and is far from only mine.

The essays assembled here were not originally written to be a book, but since they all emanate from the desk of one obsessive worrier, they are shot through with similar concerns: the soul of American poetry, the nature of the American body politic, the definition of conscience, the cost of...

This begins, like so many things, with a mistake I made. In the fall of 1990, I was interviewed by a reporter from the Burlington (Vermont) Free Press who was writing a piece about plans for New England Review, the literary quarterly of which I had recently become the editor. We talked for a while about NER’s editorial policies and procedures—how many manuscripts arrived daily in the mail (fifty), how many ultimately saw print, all the usual questions. The conversation focused mainly on the pragmatics of our internal operations, so it is perhaps understandable that when she innocently asked,...

It is arguable whether, as Virginia Woolf famously wrote, “on or about December 1910 human character changed.” It is also arguable exactly what she meant when she wrote it. If the usual interpretation—that Woolf is describing the birth of modernism—were correct, and if the resulting timetable were the literal truth, then the suicide of the American poet Vachel Lindsay on December 5, 1931, precisely twenty-one years after Woolf’s transformative month, could be regarded as coinciding with the arrival of modernism’s difficult adulthood.

Eleanor Ruggles, one of Lindsay’s biographers, provides this account of his death:

[Lindsay’s wife Elizabeth] was...

In January 1990, when I was editing New England Review, a Texas writer named Ewing Campbell (Weave It like Nightfall; The Rincón Triptych; Piranesi’s Dream) received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in the field of creative writing/fiction. There was, I imagine, appropriate celebration in Hearne, where Campbell then lived. An NEA fellowship is both an honor and a very useful professional dispensation; Campbell was able almost immediately to take time off from his job in the English Department at Texas A&M to devote his full attention to writing. This, of course, is precisely what NEA fellowships are supposed...

In the foreword of The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950–1984, Adrienne Rich raises, with typical wisdom and incisiveness, a crucial issue about the relationship between craft and the particular consciousness of any poet:

One task for the nineteen- or twenty-year-old poet who wrote the earliest poems here was to learn that she was neither unique nor universal, but a person in history …. The learning of poetic craft was much easier than knowing what to do with it—with the powers, temptations, privileges, potential deceptions, and two-edged weapons of language.

The complexities of this position—...

Recently, meditating about poetry and about issues of personal and cultural history generally and class in the American South particularly, I had an urge to look back at W. J. Cash’s classic The Mind of the South. But when I went to my bookshelf, I found that the book, like so many others, had unaccountably vanished. “Oh, no,” I thought, “The Mind of the South is lost!” Convinced that The Mind of the South could be bought cheaply, I went to a large used bookstore and asked for it. “The Mind of the South,” said the helpful cashier. “Would that...

During the night of January 1, 1991, I had a dream, which I recorded the following morning:

I am in a house that I know to be surrounded by soldiers who are very dangerous. I have no idea what they are up to, but have no doubt they will kill me if they find me. There is nowhere to hide. I am lying facedown on a sofa in a small room, trying to be inconspicuous. Suddenly one of the soldiers appears at the door. I have an impression of him, though from where I am it must be impossible for...

I find it interesting and strange that I (of all people) should be called upon to explore the southernness (of all things) of Robert Penn Warren (of all poets). In the first place, Warren’s southernness may at first glance appear—as it did to me when I first began thinking about this subject—so self-evident that any discussion along these lines would be tautological and therefore boring. It’s certainly no problem, for anyone interested in doing so, to claim Warren as a southern poet. He may not be from the South, exactly, Kentucky being a border state (and I for...

The distance between music and language—the impossibility of describing music in words, of echoing words in music, the incommensurability of phoneme and tone—is both obvious and notorious, but so is their inextricability. No one has expressed this paradox better than Nietzsche, two quotes from whom will serve to chart out this treacherous territory:

Imagine, after all preconditions, what an undertaking it must be to write music for a poem, that is, to wish to illustrate a poem by means of music, in order to secure a conceptual language for music in this way. What an inverted world! An...