1

Just as poetry is timeless, the problems that poets encounter to write are timeless, too. I want to make the following claim: American poetry draws incessantly on tradition. Not one tradition or another, but tradition itself. And not tradition as defined by its remoteness in time. It is voracious. In other words, poets know what they need and go after it. This isn't about keeping the cannon firing. But the aversion to influence or the idea of "tradition and individual talent" that pervades the American poetry "scene" is specious. American poetry is continually trying to discover itself and define itself. American poets are faced with the challenge of having to synthesize and transcend the cross-fire of such issues as identity, race, ethnicity and gender in order to write poems worth reading.

How did American poetry reach its present condition? Some critics claim that a preacher man named Ralph Waldo Emerson had a volcanic effect on the imaginations of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. And while Dickinson and Whitman continue to influence the course of every American who wants to write a poem, no one—but I'm talking about scholars not poets now—seems very interested in finding out whose works had a similar effect on Emerson. A new critical biography claims to tell you everything Emerson read. And while Horace is "listed," the biographer does not note how deeply affected Emerson must have been by the didactic element in his poetry. By and large, Emerson's rhythmic prose sounds better than Horace in English except in the very best adaptations. Thoreau and Emerson get the power of their rhetoric of newness from ancient sources.

"To fill the hour—that is happiness; to fill the hour and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them. Under the oldest mouldiest conventions a man of native force prospers just as well as in the newest world, and that by skill of handling and treatment. He can take hold anywhere. Life itself is a mixture of power and form, and will not bear the least excess of either. To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom . . . Five minutes of to-day are worth as much to me as five-minutes in the next millennium."

"Remember, when life's path is steep, to keep an even mind, and likewise, in prosperity, a spirit restrained from over-weening joy, Dellius, seeing thou are doomed to die, whether thou live always sad, or reclining in grassy nook take delight on holidays in some choice vintage of Falernian wine. Why do the tall pine and poplar white love to interlace their branches in inviting shade? Why does the hurrying water strive to press onward in the winding stream?" (2.3, Loeb edition)

2

When I was in my early teens in the early 1960s, there was a movie being made called Cleopatra. The tabloids and glossy magazines were filled with hype about Cleopatra for several reasons. It was way overbudget and fast becoming the most expensive movie ever made. The stars, who were among the greatest movie stars of the era, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, had fallen in love. And while I don't remember this ever being pointed out, it became interesting in retrospect that they were also cast in the role of two of history's most famous doomed lovers. American power was reaching its height. American poetry was breaking loose.

The most curious part of the Burton/Taylor pairing during the making of Cleopatra was that they really "fell in love"—in a way that not only attracted attention but, I began to see, captivated the public because (despite the debased forms in which they received information) their love was real. As their love began to mingle oddly in my imagination with the Kennedy assassination, I began what would become my first Horatian palimpsest, "Role Play," a poem that uses Latin poets' structures and strategies and transposes an American context. I had been reading "Ode 1.37," known as the "Cleopatra Ode," and the source for Andrew Marvell's poem "An Horatian Ode" which takes Oliver Cromwell as its subject. While I had read "An Horatian Ode" many times, I had never quite understood why it was supposed to be Horatian.

Dipping into the prose versions offered in the Loeb editions wasn't much help. And so many of the English adaptations of Horace that I had encountered were so arch and flippant they didn't provide me with much of a clue either. But this time, approaching Marvell's poem with determination I saw that what he had derived from Horace had to do with structure: that Horace had shown a private man a way to write a public poem. And when I compared the so-called original with Marvell's adaptation, I noticed that both poets deploy similar strategies: they both concentrate on the idea of a dignified death. Both poems are like illustrations of the line in MacBeth, "Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it."

Does anybody imagine that the Burton/Taylor liaison and the Kennedy assassination are unrelated, or do we want to wait until Burton stars in Camelotbefore we link the actor's notoriety to the politician's? Notoriety. Being in a public space. Worshipped and envied. Tracked and traced. And yet the American poet is often deluded by the fantasy of not being weighed down with antiquity, of having an incredible opportunity to encounter history anew without an overlay.

Here's section 5 of "Role Play":

"Yet she, seeking to die to a nobler death, showed for the dagger's point no woman's fear, nor sought to win with her swift fleet some secret shore; she even dared to gaze with face serene upon her fallen palace; courageous, too, to handle poisonous asps, that she might draw black venom to her heart, waxing bolder as she resolved to die; scorning, in sooth, the thought of being borne, a queen no longer, on hostile galleys to grace a glorious triumphs—no craven woman she!"

When I happened upon Ode 3.6, "Delicta maiorum immeritus lues, / Romane," what is known as the Empire Ode and what the Loeb lamely titles Religion and Purity,and David Ferry straightforwardly calls it "To the Romans," I was once again plunged into a meditation about meditation about American history within the context of the history of empire. American history became available to me through antiquity. It isn't news to point out that America has become an empire not all that dissimilar to that of ancient Rome. And so I chose to highlight the subject, interweaving ancient issues of empire with America's current struggle with its high position in today's more volatile world, unearthing unexpected parallels between yesteryear's artists, saints, and martyrs, and their contemporary equivalents. The Romans treated the Etruscans much as the Americans treated Native Americans.