I have a dear friend whom I admire in all things and who herself writes beautifully and clearly but who has what I consider a blind spot. “Ian,” she says, “I love your columns but when I see those indents coming in the text denoting poems I skip!” Ah, well, nobody is perfect and anyway the fact is that most people feel the same way.
Poetry, that age-old art, which first issued from the throats of man in cadenced song thousands of years gone by and which has lit the minds and lifted up the hearts and healed the souls of men and women through the ages, is now hardly noticed by the general population. People at large have little conception of what Pushkin, the Russian who wrote some of the greatest poetry ever written in the early 19th century, was talking about when he said, “That hour is blessed when we meet a poet … he stands on a basis of equality with the powerful of the earth and the people bow down before him.”
I hardly think these days poets are counted among the powerful of the earth. And yet… it is remarkable how often the words of Martin Carter find themselves on the lips of the widest range of influential people who may scarcely know the details of his work yet lines of his poetry have become part of their mental makeup and are
