Poet's Choice

In his seminal essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T.S. Eliot argues that only a poet's grounding in history sustains the work after the tidal upsurge of adolescent passion has receded. Jack Gilbert draws from history when he goes from a warrior's fevered heroics to the average wife's daily fidelity in "The Abnormal Is Not Courage":

The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German

tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers.

A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.

And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question

the bravery. Say it's not courage. Call it a passion.

Would say courage isn't that. Not at its best.

Those overly punctuated lines make you stop and start, forcing you to inhabit a mind formulating an opinion, one phrase at a time. And then he delves into what he means:

It was impossible, and with form. They rode in sunlight.

Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.

Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches.

The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment.