Milton Was The First Person

The Professionalization Of Poetry, Or The Balkanization, Has Come Out Of The Fact That When You Apply To Most Creative Writing Programs, You Have To Choose Your Genre.

[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.

Milton Was The First Person Who Really Experimented With Putting Politics Into Sonnets.

You Begin To See That All Of These Things Are Connected: The Kind Of Cuts That Mean Less Environmental Protection Are Also The Kind Of Cuts That Mean Less Musical Education For The Schools And That Also Mean More Overcrowded Schools.

I Don't Know That I Had A Sense That There Was Such A Thing As "the Poetry World" In The 1960s And Early 70s. Maybe Poets Did, But For Me As An Onlooker And Reader Of Poetry, Poetry Felt Like It Was Part Of A Larger Literary World. I Mean, Even The Phrase "the Poetry World" Reflects A Sort Of Balkanization Of American Literary And Artistic Life That Has To Some Extent Happened Since Then.