“A Low Dishonest Decade”: The Poet Points the Way Upward

On September 1, 1939, a poet walked into a New York bar and, surveying the darkening world of his time, wrote a poem dedicated to that day. It was, of course, the day Germany invaded Poland, and sentient people knew in their bones that war was coming; in fact, it would be a world war, another one, so soon after the first.

Remarkably, that poem speaks to us now in our own darkening times. Not that a world war seems imminent, though who knows where president Donald Trump’s reckless order to have Iran’s top general killed by drone will…