At the outset of my remarks I said that I would look more broadly at the subject of poetry and responsibility. For me, that starts with the question of poetry and personal responsibility, then moves to poetry and civic, or public, responsibility.

When we think of poets and their public speech today, we are likely to think of poetry as protest.

What a moment it is, to find a poet whose work is unlike any other, and is so good that we pray the poetry gods will keep her safe and warm and grant her a long life of writing such poems for us. For me that moment was when I read her poems in Poetry magazine years ago.

In a letter written in April 1922 the poet Hart Crane posed a question to a friend: “Will radios, flying machines, and cinemas have such a great effect on poetry in the end?”

The first law of language is that there are no laws of language. The laws of language are not the laws of the dictionary.

Just as Emily Dickinson wrote, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” I hope that this poem takes the top of your head off — metaphorically, of course!