JFK comes as close as anyone on the importance of poetry, at Amherst, October, 1963. “When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths which serve as the touchstone of judgment. The artist, forever faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state.”

One can easily enough succumb to the notion that he will never be a writer of any significance.

But that is not what the child believes, as when he picks up a pencil to draw. Nor is that what the college kid believes when he listens to records of JFK speeches on wintry days before a turntable, with headphones on, in the music library, drawn by cadence and a tone of voice, by the power of words.

One believes, can only believe, in himself. One believes in himself as a writer, and the belief, I suppose, is the primary, the main, the principle thing.

Any writer is a boy who dreams. To do his work, he must be solitary.

We all want, in a way, the heroic parts of ourselves, to be Lincolns and Kennedys. They were public men who understood poetry and drew on the power of words. Perhaps we think of going to law school as the logical start. But not all of us have the resources of a wealthy father, or of deep ambition and confidence and a patience to find the crux, the principle matter of the day.

To be a statesman of any sort, in any line of work, be it one of letters or music or art, one must believe in himself, in himself just as he is, just as his tastes are, crafted by his nature. He must also have a faith to develop his own nature.

One will fight all sorts of things, strange things, obstacles, the variety of human nature, weaknesses and indirection. There are pitfalls and traps, and one falls into them such that he may well lose his pride and ambition, enchanted as he has become by his own downfalls and the repeated failings of bad habits. Those are the sorts of mistakes that develop wisdom, shrewdness and character, from the very things that one feels tarnished by.

It can be, it may be, easy to miss the common blood of ambition in the boy, particularly when he has fallen. It will help him if he’s had some ambition before, to remember--even if it was little more than arrogance back then—and recognize the fine stuff that breathes inside of him still. For certainly he will, through the difficulties and complexities of life find himself fallen and lost, so as to bring worry and anxiety upon his house. Even by goodness of heart may he fall, for not clinging to a calculating nature.

Then, as before he knew, as a student he will find as a tool, by which to begin to dig himself out of the hole he’s fallen into, something within. His eloquence will have survived the bad years, the lost times, the night, the vagrant companions. Even in his fallen state, it will feel a good and necessary thing for him, to write. He knows this eloquence as the thing to carry him from the mess he has made for himself.

And then, even those who would, out of little fault of their own, shun and avoid him and count him out, will hear his eloquence and take note.


When I was a young fellow fresh out of college I read books about politics. I read about Lincoln. I read about JFK and RFK. And who hasn’t, taken with a flush of adolescent dreamy optimism and hopes to achieve something that stands in the world, something good and wise.

And then there comes a time of apparent realism, apparent realization. Less prone are we to reach for such books, and less optimistic are we that we might ourselves ever live such influential lives. We find realities abounding, and none of those twists of fate that fall in line to raise one up.

Hopes fade. Maybe they are kept in secret reserves, kept out of the light of day. I turned away from Making of the President 1960 and Sandburg’s Lincoln, and more and more I read fictive literature. I put away histories of moral causes and legislative works. I read about people in odd and unhappy situations, as if they reflected my own world. I gained in empathy as I put hopes aside.

And then, as if through reaching an end of a certain weary chapter of my own life, I remembered afresh the vital importance of those works I had come to shun, those of the special people for whom politics and speeches are incredibly creative, boldly and broadly imaginative as art.

To empathize on the one hand, to keep on the other a form of active hope for the issues of the time, of all time, developed out of the seeds of thought into some fruition: this was some way forward.

Is the writer a political force? Does he beckon us to the vital source of existence like unto the Beatitudes, from whence thereupon a direction for public minds might come?

A present age is always ruled by skeptics and faultfinders, by nay-sayers and special interest pessimists mired in the topical arguments of the day. One’s only claim against such force is the benevolence within we all can claim, as the good tree bringeth forth the good fruit.

The good fruit will seem a fiction at first, to be of too low and common and obvious a birth, tainted by humble appearance and humility, as it always will. A candle, held so as to read by.