Americans are uncomfortable with poetry (“My wife, she likes that sort of thing . . .”). Because we are uncomfortable about being uncomfortable, we adopt and praise one or two poets a generation—-as long as they don’t act like poets.
What is it to “act like a poet”? To cry? To make flowery observations about landscape? To take everything seriously? To take nothing seriously? When a poet becomes a public drunk, like Dylan Thomas or John Berryman, or when a poet parades his lechery, grabbing for groupies at the campus party, he is acting like a regular fellow; colleges love him and news magazines write him up. Lecherous, drunken poets have become a new convention; but even so, people retain the notion of poets as lofty, aloof, disdainful, spiritual, limp, remote, and snooty. Time used to tell us, every week or two, that James Dickey was a former football hero.
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