Captivity is Consciousness --
So's Liberty.
-- Emily Dickinson, "No Rack can torture me --"

IN this account of American poetry, I have considered only those
writers whose work has made a considerable difference in the way
poets have made their poems and readers have had to read them.
These are, as I have said, the poets who have taught our forebears
and us how to read -- through poems how to read our world. Thus I
have left unexamined the work of a good number of poets, twentieth-
century poets particularly, which I might have otherwise taken into
account. Still, I think that I have considered the poets who in the
long run should matter the most to us -- our great inventors. Another
and quite different kind of exception, of course, is the group of poets
I have considered in Chapter Five. Yet it is an exception that proves
my rule, since the would-be people's poets considered there are those
who, willing to meet their readers halfway or more, tried to learn
from them how to write. Such poets have rather been made by his-
tory than have made it, and must be considered accordingly. The
major poets do make history. The burden of this narrative has been
to elucidate that history: to see it in the making and to inquire into
its meaning for the culture whose spirit and style it manifests; to
understand how a man's hopes for his poems (which are hopes for
his culture) are explicated by their form and function; to measure
the degree to which he has assumed the responsibility such hopes
have put upon him.

Recently we have been much troubled by the question of this
responsibility and all it implies for the bearing of American liter-
ature on American life. We have come to realize that the question
can be resolved only after it has been correctly stated: in the terms
in which it has been regularly conceived. In this study these terms

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