There seem always to have been certain aggregated pressures of political
and self- awareness comprising an imperative to poets, even if they have
failed explicitly to notice this; it's hardly provocative of Doug to say
that he believes we SHOULD be doing something in particular, recent
outcroppings of the socially encrypted imperative for us lot seem largely
to have been I'LL DO WHAT I LIKE, YOU DO WHAT YOU LIKE, but it would be
quite historically unaware of us to think that this attitudinising were
much other than a characteristic of our present predicament. There is
always less room, shrinking. I agree with Doug, the imperative for me too
is recognition of an international predicament. I'm sure he and I go
about expressing this belief in quite different ways. This imperative
does not account for my responses entirely, or for his. I don't know, but
I suppose he would agree with me, that the poet who states his
unwillingness to recognise any imperative or predicament in which such an
imperative could have arisen without his noticing it, expresses an
attitude which is quite simply the product of that very predicament:
freedom makes free. There is a history to freedom, even as a snip of
poetic diction it ranges back into history with signal relevance to world
politic. None of us seem to me free to object to this imperative with any
radical propriety.
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