Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word ‘myth’ only for stories we ourselves cannot believe.

During that long span of time, then, Jewish history would have to be written in other ways. It would become the story not of power, but of ideas and beliefs. And its most important turning points would not be the winning of wars or the building of monuments, but the writing of books.

With luck, a writer capable of producing both Slouching Towards Kalamazoo and The Blood of the Lamb will not remain unappreciated for long.

So how can a poet-an intelligent, serious poet-write mystical verse now? The poetry of Adam Zagajewski provides the beginning of an answer to this question.

Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word "myth" only for stories we ourselves cannot believe.

In the 1970s, for example, I found myself learning to relish the poetry of Andrew Marvell and Sir Thomas Wyatt, and getting a handle on poetry of plainer speech than I had dwelt with heretofore. Which led me into a new appreciation of middle [William Butler ] Yeats, of the short three-beat line and forward-driving syntax, and that paid in, in turn, to a poem like Casualty in Field Work. The traffic, however, was usually the other way. My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.

Teaching and writing have tended to proceed on parallel lines, but there have been times when there was indeed carry-over from the classroom to the creative work.

The unadmitted reason why traditional readers are hostile to e-books is that we still hold the superstitious idea that a book is like a soul, and that every soul should have its own body.

The lesson Arendt drew was that a beautiful soul is not enough, for "it was precisely the soul for which life showed no consideration." To live fully and securely, every human being needs what Arendt calls "specificity," the social and political status that comes with full membership in a community.

Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word 'myth' only for stories we ourselves cannot believe.