WEBVTT

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I want to jump from
those poems whose

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decor, if you want to
look at it that way,

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is apparently Europe and remote,
to three poems, altogether

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four poems but three and then
a break and then another one--

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shorter poems.

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And they're all poems that
are much closer to hand.

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There are much obviously--

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much closer obviously to hand.

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They're all about America
and about an attempt to--

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I think one of the things
about America that we all share

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is the feeling that we
don't really believe it.

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And that it's-- and this is one
of the difficulties in trying

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to come to grips with
it imaginatively.

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Because the
imagination bounces off

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the American way of life
in some strange way.

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And all of that
mythology that we know

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is there is something that
seems to escape or exasperate.

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Not finally escape but
exasperate writer after writer.

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Exasperated Whitman
and Melville.

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And it's still to be found.

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And it's true of all mythology.

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But in a peculiar
way, it's our story.

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And I think the next
three that I'm going

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to read also happen to do--

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have to do with some
mythological Western landscape

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and Western in all of
the senses of that word.

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And the first of the three is
even called "Western Country".

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Some days after so long
even the sun is foreign.

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I watched the exiles.

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Their stride stayed
by their antique faith

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that no one can die in
exile, when all that is true

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is that death is not exile.

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Each no doubt knows a Western
country half discovered,

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which he thinks is there
because he thinks he left it.

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And its names are still
written in the sun in his age

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and he knows them.

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But he will never
tread their ground.

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At some distances, I
can no longer sleep.

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My countrymen are more
cruel than their stars.

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And I know what moves
the long files stretching

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into the mountains,
each man with his gun,

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his feet one finger's
breadth off the ground.

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