Not everything here deals with poetry. It all deals with freedom and aesthetics, though, and indirectly at least, with aesthetic innovations in poetry for the sake of freedom.

The type of freedom varies: aesthetic, imaginative, political, individual (which despite popular beliefs in some quarters is not the same as political), sexual, emotional, historical, psychological, linguistic (with respect to translation), rhetorical, fantastical (as in fantasy worlds) and philosophical. A number of puzzling attitudes toward freedom, such as those of the Language poets, to wit, that if poets free their words of all familiar contexts they will produce more adventurous poems, are omitted except to take note of their absurdity. Along these lines, it should be noted that ours may be the first age in which nonsense verse is often produced by people without any sense of humor. In this topsy- turvy situation, in which solemnity is confused with profundity, poets may find it close to impossible to write another “Jabberwocky.”

From the moment when I began writing these essays and reviews, in other words, I wanted to take a stab at exploring significant aspects of the problem of modern poetic freedom. I also welcomed the fact that in any of the arts the present evokes the past, if only because works of art, at least at first, assume much of their meaning in relation to other works of art. The prospect of dealing with the past in terms of the present retains a magnetic, rather than an antiquarian, appeal: one reads the medieval German poet Walter von der Vogelweide not because he is old but because he is new, and not because he offers more astute insights into his own culture than his historian contemporaries but because his poetic intelligence differs from theirs in refreshing and insightful ways, and not because he is an anthropologist (which he is not) but for his literary style. This literary achievement, that of style, is often neglected now, along with how thrilling and incisive it can be, how valuable, and these essays seek to draw attention to it.