In an era when political leaders promise deliverance from decline through America’s purported preeminence in scientific research, the news that science is in deep trouble in the United States has been as unwelcome as a diagnosis of leukemia following the loss of health insurance.

[…] but Bradon all afloate / When it was tolde to her, set open such a throate, / That all the countrey rang.

They thought strikes and hunger marches the quintessence of politics and Soviet Russia heaven on earth.

Tonight, for instance, now that Bert has been here, I listen to the piercing screams of palliardizing cats without self-pity. Another of these “posthumous” poems, “Glad,” written in 1965, was a second-person address […]