very sensibly of the trap into whichnmodern poets have fallen. Nonetheless,nSteele remains optimistic: “Whoncould have predicted in 1560 thatnShakespeare would be born? Whoncould have anticipated, at that rathernundistinguished point in English literarynhistory, the extraordinary work thatnhe and contemporaries like Jonson andnDonne would be producing before thencentury was out?”nOne can only wish that such optimismnwere justified. But great poetry isnnot the result of some genetic accident.nPoetry grows out of the life of ancommunity, not out of a poet’s brain ornin a workshop, even a formalist workshop.nRobert Bly may have hit upon annimportant point in noticing the preponderancenof immigrants’ childrennand grandchildren among M.F.A.’s.nComparatively few of our better poetsnhave been of anything but old Americannstock. Quite as much as the Yankeenand Southern poets of the 19th century,nthe moderns — Frost, Eliot, Pound,nStevens, Crane, Moore, Cummings —nall had roots in the American past. Innfiction the case is different: there havenbeen many fine novels on the immigrantnexperience. In poetry, however,nit has been the national experience thatnhas, for the most part, occupied thenattention of poets who have been concernednwith social history. Adams andnJefferson are important personae in thenCantos, and The Bridge is HartnCrane’s attempt at a national epic, butnI cannot think of major works of poetrynthat are the equivalent of Giants in thenEarth, My Antonia, or Call It Sleep.nI think the answer lies within thennature of poetry itself. At its best, versenhas been able to express a community’snidea of itself. Homer and Aeschylus,nVergil and Horace, Shakespeare, Scott,nWordsworth, and Tennyson all wrotenexplicitiy as recorders and interpretersnof their nation’s histories. There are, ofncourse, many other types of poetry, butnin the Anglo-American tradition, mostnof the best work has been done bynwriters responding to a community tonwhich they belonged. Could Miltonnhave been anything but a 17th-centurynPuritan? Hellenistic Greeks managednto write a cosmopolitan poetry, butneven they were obsessed with localnhistory, to say nothing of their commonnGreekness.nIs the decay of poetry’s estate —nboth of poets and readers — a reflectionnof a deeper decay in the nationalncharacter, of a nation without an identity,na people without a history? Evennat the beginning of this century Frostnworked hard at being a Yankee, andnpoor Vachel Lindsay stumped acrossnthe length and breadth of the heartland,nlooking for its soul. Two generationsnlater, Lowell and Berrymannseemed to have learned their Americanout of books. Is it an accident thatntoday so much of the best poetry isnbeing written by a few Southernersnwho, whether they hate or love thenSouth, cannot escape it?nFred Chappell still believes in thenpoet’s vocation — not, it is true, in thisnchauvinist sense. In his recent essay,n”The Function of the Poet” (an addressnpresented at Roanoke College),nMr. Chappell writes of the social difficultiesnoccasioned by his eccentricnchoice of profession. He used to tellnstrangers he was an English teacher,nwhich always elicited one of two responses:n”I guess I’d better watch myngrammar,” or “That was my worstnsubject in school.” But now he tells then”shiny young executives” he is a poet:nThen comes the longest pausenyou could ever imagine: thenByzantine civilization comesnLIBERAL ARTSnGIMME PRISON, NOT PROBATIONnand goes while this nice youngnman ponders. Finally comes thensentence, the phrase thatnenables him to turn back to hisnfigures and bottom lines withnequanimity, dismissing me andnmy concerns to Etruscannobscurity. “I suppose,” he says,n”there’s not much money innthat.”nBut even people who have twittednChappell for years for being a poet sendnhim the poems they have written innresponse to the great moments of theirnlives. We cannot, it would seem, livenwithout poetry, at least occasionally,nand the vast sums of money that Americanspends on the generally poor verse ofnsongwriters and rappers is powerful testimonynto this need. Being Americans,nit is true, we pay for a lot of bad versenthat sounds exactly the same, just as wenspend enormous sums in a year onnhamburgers that all taste the same.nNeither is terribly nourishing, either fornthe body or the soul, but they enable usnto get by. Most of us have not yet,nhowever, sunk to the point of eatingntexturized soy protein and syntheticnfood, and few of us are willing to readnthe synthetic verse by-products of thenpoetry workshops. ^^^n”It’s the first time I’ve ever had where somebody was tryingnto break into jail,” said Houston’s Assistant District AttorneynChuck Rosenthal. According to the AP, a twenty-two-yearoldnlandscaper named David Winfree pleaded guilty last Julynfor breaking into the Municipal Prison Farm and wasnsentenced to a year in the Harris County Jail. He was arrestednin the prison’s maintenance building, where he said he wasnlooking for landscaping tools.n”It gotten to the point that the judicial system has made itnso attractive for criminals that criminals ask us for prison timeninstead of probation,” said state District Judge MichaelnMcSpadden. He was referring to the rash of recent incidentsnin which criminals have requested prison time instead ofnprobation because of the high probability of receiving earlynrelease. Early release has become the solution of choice fornstates with overcrowded prisons.nnnFEBRUARY 1991/25n