Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets, the decline of the West that seems less a decline than the fall preceding an explosion.
"The Third Book of Criticism". Book by Randall Jarrell, "Fifty Years of American Poetry", pp. 332 - 333, 1969.
