We shape the world and the world shapes us.
Poetry giveth, and Poetry taketh away.
The Muse will no have more of this “hero
with a gun,” the hero as killer, will have no
more of Aristotle’s now empty sounding
assertion that ethical excellence and courage
can only be demonstrated on the battlefield.
No. The hero has become the one rarely seen,
sitting alone next to a pond in New England,
meditating on the ending of the slavery of
the Mind, of Nature, of one’s fellow Man. Or
one who walks in protest to make salt at the
sea in nothing but a loincloth and sandals, and
brings an entire Empire to its knees. Or the one
who transcends the racial violence of an Alabama
to be the voice of conscience for the whole world
that ends the brutal genocide of the American
Conflict in Vietnam. I say to you: that is the new
spirit of Poetry, of the new hero, of and for
our time.