Powell belongs, in fact to the first generation of American poets who may have grown up without even a vestigial connection to the accentual-syllabic, rhyming English tradition - his inventive lines have this absence at their back.

"Poetry" refers to the quite challenging and quite resistant sets of words put together to be admired and interpreted by people who are already into that sort of thing, somewhat analogous to free jazz or academic classical music. Which is stuff that I really like, but is late modernist and is going to have a limited audience.

Gunn would be an important figure-rewarding, delightful, accomplished, enduring-in the history of English-language poetry even were his life not as fascinating as it now seems; he would be an important figure in the history of gay writing and in the history of transatlantic literary relations even were his poetry not so good as it is. With his life as it was and his works as they are, he's an obvious candidate for a volume of retrospective and critical essays, and this one is first-rate.

Good poems do a lot of things at once. Often, by doing so, they encourage us to acknowledge mixed and incompatible feelings. Good poems, like good works of history, resist monocausal explanations for anything. There's not one reason why I am angry or excited or hopeful, when I feel those things. And there's not one reason why President Obama won two elections. And there's not one reason why Donald Trump won the most recent presidential election.

If we recover something like a functioning, well-informed democratic polity - if it hasn't been wrecked for good by the people who are getting in now, if millennials and teenagers can come to maturity in a world where we hold free and fair elections and agree on what fact is - Lin-Manuel Miranda is going to have a lot to do with that.

Some poets marry a language; some have affairs with it; some treat it as a parent, some as a child, some as an equal, or as a friend.

Poetry can explain individuals to ourselves, and change our attitudes, and help us see the complexity of the world, but the kind of poetry I follow isn't going to change public opinion directly. Other art forms can - if you're a TV writer, you have some interesting challenges, or if you're a country musician, somebody like Brad Paisley. But poetry not so much.