The answer to the editor’s first question is a firm yes, my understanding of what writing and writers can (and ought to) achieve within a human society has changed. During my lifetime writers and writing have been supplanted as the dominant interpreter of values by the more corporate and less privately demanding media of television, film and popular music, and I can hardly deny the effect of this without being a fool: one can now become an "important" writer and be without any significant influence.

Given that fundamental alteration, it remains possible to say that good writing is still valuable because it permits us to treat complex subject matters with conceptual precision and thus enhances our ability to think accurate, complex thoughts and to communicate them to others. More broadly, a society needs to be able to articulate complexities if it is to avoid social and interpersonal violence as a problem-solving device, or beyond that, to be just and healthily democratic.

Beneath the changes brought on by the new media, clear language--specifically metaphor and rhetoric--remains the first instruments of both public and private clarity. Properly considered in isolation of its waning aesthetic value, poetry (if not verse and the Biz) has always acted as the janitorial service for metaphor and rhetoric, both of which require high degrees of maintenance to protect their vitality and their precisions. In that sense, absurd as it may sound, the virtues of a poet’s pursuit may be more important than the bean-counter’s virtues that obsess both the private and public sectors of today’s society.

All of these latter things I would have agreed with in 1970 if I’d recognized their presence. But I’ve also changed my mind about is the role the self plays in the operation of poetry, and the degree to which sublimating--or even suppressing--the self is necessary to achieve relevant accuracy in the use of poetic language. Partly, the change is a consequence of having my testosterone levels drop low enough that I can occasionally think through something without erotic and biomission intrusions fogging up my glasses, but the change is also partly the product of recognizing that there are no stable pathways from the self into the world. In 1970, I believed that the road to poetic accuracy ran right through the most rubble-littered intersections of the self. That was the fatuous Zeitgeist of the 70s: any world cleanup must be preceded by spiritual self-cleansing. Now I understand that it is the world that creates the paths, not the self.

Twentieth Century history intrudes here, and mightily. Lyric poetry, as we who write in English know it and practice it, is the product of the Great War of 1914-1918. In the course of placing 60 million men of breeding age into a hell of mud, steel and high explosive--and then setting them to murder and maim one another, the ruling classes of the era subjected the young of their educated classes to stresses--collective misery without satisfactory ritual solidarities; massive numbers of premature and pointless deaths, and a cognitive culture that valorized meditation under extreme and unreasonable physically conditions that could only be comprehended and articulated through lyric devices. The British, more than any other combatant nation, seemed to have gone out of their way to exterminate an entire generation of its well-educated and articulate young men this way.