The Stuff Of Poetry

The Stuff of PoetryLanguage is a casualty of the 20th Century. All-purpose obscenity and mindless slang have become the favorite forms of verbal communication among the young; the bland terminology of bureaucracies has worked itself into the style of their elders; and political rhetoric, Nixonese, has never been drearier. A favorite cliché of the times is "those are only words, they don't mean anything." The keepers of the language, the poets, seem to be in hiding. There are those who...