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It Takes a Poet
Eight decades ago, while the Second World War was raging in a state of frenzy, William Francis Jackson Knight wrote in his still very readable book, Roman Vergil:
‘The Romans were hard, cynical materialists. Bloodshed was what you saw and the news you heard. Shameless exploitation was accepted as normal. We could say the same of our time. But just occasionally, even to contemporaries, a window is opened on to the soul of an age. There are hard things, and there are soft things, which last and in the future have their command. These are the things which it takes a poet to see and say.’