Justice is the well water of the city of Novgorod, black and sweet.

There's a good deal in Pound's and Eliot's poetry that stood up even though their politics were deplorable. Or Pound's very deplorable, Eliot's kind of deplorable.

[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.

The record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists.

Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.