World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.
“Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.”
“Whether the prayer of Seneca was granted we do not know; but, as we do not again hear of Marcus, it is probable that he died before his father, and that the line of Seneca, like that of so many great men, became extinct in the second generation.”