"The uneasy relationship between the intellectual—and what fraction of poets in this volume don’t carry advanced degrees?—and the laborer is not new, and is not much changed. But the point is that the pastoral has always been about limited power relative to the world—it has held up a mirror to the heroic and shown a representative person who, in Alpers’s words, “is able to sing out his dilemmas and pain, but . . . is unable to act so as to resolve or overcome them, or see them through to their end.”" Jesse Lichtenstein • Harp & Altar

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