"Poetry is the most honest language I hear today. It can be unbearably honest. Such honesty is why even modest poems are useful — better a fumbling effort at truth than a slickly packaged lie — and good ones indispensable. Against the sybaritic images of advertising that daily wash over us, against the sententious rhetoric of politics, poetry stands as 'the expression of faith in the integrity of the senses and of the imagination' (W. S. Merwin's description). The poets I have met would be incapacitated if they did not write from a place of truth. Revelation is their reason for being.

"Revelation comes hard. As Stanley Kunitz once acknowledged, poetry is 'the most difficult, most solitary, and most life-enhancing thing that one can do. It's a struggle because words get tired. We use them. We abuse them. A word is a utilitarian tool to begin with, and we have to re-create it, to make it magical. You have to kill off all the top of one's head, remove it, and try to plunge deep into self, deep into memories, deep into the unconscious life. And then begin again.'

"Now in his ninetieth year, Kunitz still plumbs the depths. He says that 'poetry is a means of feeling that, solitary as you are, in the act of writing the poem you are in touch with the whole chain of being. You are always trying not only to get in touch with your most primal self, but with the whole history of the race.'

"If that were the only reason for poetry, it would be enough. In accepting the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, Czeslaw Milosz said: 'Our planet gets smaller every year, and with its fantastic proliferation of mass media is witnessing a process that defies definition, characterized by a refusal to remember.' A refusal to remember. Yet memory is critical if a people are not to be at the mercy of the powers-that-be, if they are to have something against which to measure what the partisans and propagandists tell them today. Memory is critical if, as democracy requires, we are to make midcourse corrections in the affairs of state and our personal behavior. Mark Twain wrote that a cat, once it had sat on a hot stove, would never do so again, but neither would it sit on a cold stove. We humans are different. We can reflect on our experiences and share the insights with others. Life becomes a conversation between generations — past, present, future. 'New ages don't begin all at once,' Bertolt Brecht said. 'My grandfather lives in the new age. My grandson will still live in the old. New meat is eaten with old forks. From the new antennae come the old stupidities. Wisdom is passed from mouth to mouth.' "