'
The Times was much stirred by the news of Humbolt's death and gave him a double-column spread. The photograph was large. For after all Humbolt did what poets in crass America are supposed to do. He chased ruin and death even harder than he had chased women....He plouged himself under. Okay so did Edgar Allen Poe, picked out of the baltimore gutter. And Hart Crane over the side of a ship. And Jarrell falling in front of a car. And poor John Berryman jumping from a bridge. For some reason this awfulness is peculiarly appreciated by business and technological america. The country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poets' testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkeness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can't perrform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miricle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved because they just can't amke it here. They exist to light up the enormity of hte awful tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say, ' If II were not such a corrupt, unfeeling basterd, creep, theif, and vulture, I couldn't get through this either. Look at these good and tender and soft men, the best of us. They succumbed, poor loonies.'


both from Humbolt's Gift
Saul Bellow