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I’m in Ghana for a week — starting from Cape Coast, toward the western end of Ghana’s Atlantic shore. Cape Coast is a university town and a major fishing center in West Africa. It’s the spot where First Lady Michelle Obama locates her ancestors. It is the site of the Castle that President Obama and his family visited last July. No ordinary tourist attration, the Castle is the place that haunts human history eternally as the point where millions of Africans were warehoused, then shipped in the infamous Middle Passage to slavery in the new worlds of North and South America.

I am picking up many threads (starting with slavery) of a conversation that began most of ten years ago with the poet and teacher Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang, at the University of Cape Coast. His voice has become for me one of the beautiful deep songs of Africa. Before I’d ever met Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang, his book of poetry and prose, Cape Coast Castle jumped into my hands off a bookstore table in Accra, and many of his lines seemed to clutch my heart and never let go:

Slavery is the living wound under the patchwork of scars. A lot of time has passed, yet whole nations cry, sometimes softly, sometimes harshly, often without knowing why…

… perhaps the most horrendous experience of the victim society belonged to a group hardly ever mentioned in the literature: the damned who survived, those deprived relatives of the captured African. These included parents, brothers and sisters, uncles and other relatives and friends who knew and cared for the captive. In a way, theirs was a lot de profoundis, a lost of deepest death. For they were denied the cathartic benefit of a burial for their loved ones. Olaudah Equiano, the 18th century African abolitionist, tells the story in his autobiography of 1789 of how, as a greening youth, he and his sister were kidnapped from their Igbo village by slavers while their parents were at the farm… And yet what we read is not the full story, only a portion of it. For Equiano’s mother came home from the farm one evening to find her only daughter and youngest son stolen, never to be heard from again. We do not know her story. Nobody knows the story of her grief…

The Castle is a standing provocation to thought and action: upon its disarming rests a whole people’s freedom. Cape Coast Castle, the metaphor and the edifice, is a society in itself, a society of experiences, a system or order whose fundamental concepts are planted in the disordering of our society. We kneel because it stands, and it stands for a system of production, distribution and exchange. But it does not tend what it produces, does not nurture what it distributes, does not value what it exchanges. There is no tending, no nurturing, no valuing…

The fact is that the pressures of our societies today, the tributes we play in blood — colonialism, neo-colonialism, even poverty in the lopsided world order — are largely the effects of the slave trade. In the trade, societies were ransacked, the land was gutted, its human loam was washed to the sea, its potential was stunted…

Slavery gives the enslaved nothing but a legacy of pain, alienation, fear, and worst of all, a fetish erected around the denial of the fact and lasting effects of enlavement. It is a fetish that allows us to pretend that our world is whole; thus we nullify the castle by incorporating, then ignoring it. And so we live in a shattered world with an eroded sense of history in a world we swear is whole.

Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang, Cape Coast Castle, A Collection of Poems, 1996. Pages 1 – 10.

I associate Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang with a broad and deep unofficial drive in Ghana to break an old silence around slavery. About the time his book was published, a troupe of Jamaican musicians and dancers refused to perform at Ghana’s first Pan-African Arts Festival, precisely because it was being held in the Castle where their forebears had been stockpiled in chains. In public and private, Ghana’s conversation about itself has never been the same again. In my first Cape Coast reunion with Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang we’re trying to keep the inquiry perpetually open-ended, as he says, “so that every new generation may visit it to quarry its lessons.”

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Robert McChesney and John Nichols are grappling with the question: what would Thomas Jefferson do about the death of the American newspaper? Better, Jefferson said, to have newspapers without a government than to have government without newspapers. Yet here we are two centuries later, and the papers are disappearing. What is to sustain essential journalism in the digital age?

Core doctrine among the Founders, in the McChesney-Nichols argument, was not just that the press must be free of interference and censorship but that its vigor and variety should be sustained by subsidized access to printing and the mails. Some of the freshest parts of their book, The Death and Life of American Journalism, recount how Generals MacArthur in Japan and Eisenhower in Germany designed and built new institutions of free open journalism on the theory, as McChesney and Nichols put it, that “creating a viable free press is the first duty … of the democratic state.”

Thirty billion dollars a year is the subsidy figure that McChesney and Martin are proposing today — their projection of the support that Jefferson & Company gave to the press two centuries ago. They insist they are thinking of rebuilding a culture, not bailing out dying newspapers. They embrace Dean Baker’s idea of a Citizenship News Voucher which would let people direct the spending of, say, $200 a year, to the local, global or specialized journalism they value, so long as it’s non-profit and non-commercial.

My question — my reservation really — is the thought that the Internet is already the government’s accidental gift that keeps on giving. It’s worth much more than $30 billion to have wiped out the cost of paper, printing, delivery and all the capital barriers to a worldwide marketplace of ideas. My guess is that Thomas Jefferson, a blogger in retirement, would be reading and reveling in the digital miracle that has enabled kindred spirits like Glenn Greenwald, Juan Cole, Joshua Micah Marshall and Arianna Huffington… not to mention Robert McChesney, John Nichols and their admirable creation, FreePress. Net.

Post up, please, on what more you’d spend and where, to sustain the contentious journalism Jefferson had in mind.

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Harold Evans, doubtless the finest English newspaper editor of his time, could make you weep in his memoir of formative days in Manchester and glory years (1965 – 1981) with the Sunday Times of London. Weep, that is, not so much for the anemic papers so close to death today, but weep for those cheeky deadline artists, the newspaper writers and “subs” on the copy desk who are disappearing into memory and mythology, like the American cowboy.

My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times is the story of Harold Evans’ addiction to printed news, and of the characters whose trade he lifted — newspaper guys (and they were all guys, long before Evans met Tina Brown) with nicknames like Nifty, Bow Tie, “Big Tom” Henry, “Beachcomber” of the Daily Express, and “Mr. Will” on the Northern Echo, Evans’ first paper. “Curiosity is the thing in journalism,” Mr. Will said. “Ask questions, Evans.” And then there are the giant by-lines of the Sunday Times, like Godfrey Hodgson in America, John Barry in Ireland, David Leitch in Vietnam, and the investigator Bruce Page, everywhere.

Harold Evans spins my head around just when I’d begun to think we could do without the papers, which we may just have to. But what about those people — those “rag and bone men of the opinion trade,” where Evans located himself; those lightning desk editors on the Manchester Evening News, “hunched men in cardigans reducing cataclysms to column inches,” and all those reporters gifted, as one of them said, with “ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability.”

The thread in our conversation is: how long can free democratic people survive without those faithful wretches?

We are a mixed bunch. One of the great strengths of the Sunday Times, when I edited it, was how variegated the characters were. I mean we had a former antique dealer, who actually led us to the first exposé of the antique dealers’ rings. We had a microbiologist. We had a woman who gutted chickens who later became Anne Robinson … so we had a really variegated staff. That is one thing that I think is missing today. That heterogeneity that we celebrated is slightly disappearing… I think the business of discovering truth is much assisted by different perceptions of renegades. At the same time, I had all these these very clever PhD’s in my office. So, whichever way you spun it, it seems a very bohemian bunch of people, some of them drinking a lot, some of them smoking a lot, some of them not doing either of those things. We had a few aesthetes on my papers, in my time. But out of this multi-faceted approach to our complicated world came something very close to the truth from time to time…

It’s more important to find out than to sound off. And we get a vast amount of sounding-off today, without anybody knowing what the hell they’re talking about. Just think how different our last ten years would have been if we’d done the proper job of reporting on Iraq before we went into it… This era overlapped with the web. And I love the web. The point is that not even the web, not all the famous bloggers really got onto this.

So we have a situation, we’re entering now a world where we’re going to have cascades and cascades and cascades of information, like rain, and none of it will reach the flower of truth.

Harold Evans in conversation with Chris Lydon, January 19, 2009

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Who knew that the God question is burning bright in our university neighborhood of brain scientists, mathematicians, computer geniuses, game theorists, physicists and literary folk, too? — that is, in the postmodern precincts around Boston that I call “the frontal lobe of the universe.”

Photo Credit: Steven Pinker

The philosopher-novelist Rebecca Goldstein, both playful and stone-serious, has caught the chatter and mapped the territory in and around Brandeis, Harvard and MIT in 36 Arguments for the Existence of God — A Work of Fiction. The arguments rage in the head of the novel’s protagonist, Cass Seltzer, a best-selling psychologist of religion, a latter-day William James. TIME magazine has dubbed him “the atheist with a soul.” Career-climbing from Brandeis to Harvard, Cass (like Goldstein) is trying to triangulate a position between the death of God and the ecstasy of belief — at a safe distance from neo-atheists like, say, Sam Harris, and neo-believers like, say, Cornel West:

RG: Both sides will often offend me, and I think that’s why I felt I had to write the novel. I agree with Sam Harris. I’m on his board, of the Reason Foundation. I agree with him: our metaphysics is the same. But I’m very uncomfortable with some of the belittling descriptions of religious people. Not saying that he does it. But sometimes I hear it: “this is the fallacy that they make, this is their mistake, if we can point out where their reasoning goes astray.”

Religion and religious emotion are so much more complicated than that. One of the things that Spinoza taught us, and it’s being validated finally in neuroscientific labs, is that emotions and intellect, cognitions and passion, are inextricably bound up with one another. Cognitive states are also emotional states, and emotional states make cognitive claims.

So even for those of us who believe in reason — and again this is pure Spinoza — this itself is an emotional experience. I break into tears at beautiful mathematical proofs. This kind of intertwining is something that we all share. And so the notion that we could, on the reason side, just go through the arguments and show what’s wrong and people would stop believing is very, very false. There are reasons other than just strict logical arguments for people to be believing.

CL: Why draw a hard line between your experience of a mathematic truth, or beauty that brings you to tears, and a Dostoyevskean epiphany of the Almighty?

RG: I do believe ultimately, in terms of establishing truth, in objective means… The history of our species is filled with people being enraptured and enthralled and having private revelations that are completely counter to each other, and slaughtering each other because of these things. The Enlightenment grew out of it. John Locke, for example, has an essay “On Enthusiasm,” on religious enthusiasm, saying: look, it’s not a source of truth. It is powerful and it is ecstatic. I’m very prone to it myself. I often say ‘I spend more time out of my mind than in my mind.’ I’m extremely prone to this sort of thing.

There are all sorts of intellectual gifts that give us this feeling. For me, it’s science, math, art, music, philosophy… And it’s a kind of religious experience, you know, but for me these are much safer than trying to answer the nature of the universe… That God-almighty important question can’t be entrusted to enthusiasm. 

Rebecca Goldstein in conversation with Chris Lydon, January 16, 2009

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Click here for a high resolution JPEG of the painting.

Erica Hirshler and I are standing in many shades of awe in this conversation, in front of Boston’s favorite painting by Boston’s favorite painter. Hirshler’s compact little book, Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography of a Painting is a compendium of ways to look at a picture — at social and family history written in matador stabs of paint.

John Singer Sargent was just 26, an expatriate marvel in Paris, driven to sustain his meteoric trajectory in the Paris Salon of 1883 with this eccentric composition, 8 feet square, titled, “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.” To the often astringent eye of Henry James at the time, young Sargent presented the “slightly ‘uncanny’ spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to learn.”

The most famous and esteemed of American painters a century ago, Sargent’s reputation fell precipitously (except in Boston) after his death in 1925. In comparisons with Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins and J. M. Whistler and then the moderns, Sargent was fashionably slighted as soulless, superficial, even un-American — much as Henry James, too, was slashed for an “instinct for the capillaries,” for being “one of the nicest old ladies I ever met,” as William Faulkner once put it.

But time and your own naked eye have their way of righting these judgments. I was astonished not long ago to see Sargent and the Boit Daughters on the walls of the Metropolitan museum in New York, standing tall alongside the best of Manet and Velazquez in a 2003 show on “The French Taste for Spanish Painting.” And it’s common now to see both Sargent and James less as masterful scholars of the past, which they were, but more as proto moderns in psychology and technique. The contemporary abstractionist painter Robert Baart joins our conversation to detail Sargent’s bold magic with “juicy paint,” with an expressionistic brush that anticipates Willem de Kooning and Richard Diebenkorn.

The emotional readings of the four Boit sisters get juicier all the time: four girls “homeless in their own home,” Sister Wendy judges. Was Sargent imagining four versions of What Maisie Knew, Henry James’ childs-eye reflections on a disastrous marriage and “the rites of passage from wonder to knowledge,” or perhaps What Maisie Would Find Out. Sargent presents, I think, four “stages” of girlhood, with the youngest, Julia, in the foreground with her doll, playing at a fifth stage, motherhood. Yet none of these girls married or bore a child. Not the least fascination in this painting is looking for John Singer Sargent’s measure of the Boit Daughters’ inner lives and destinies. Can not the careful reader of these four “portraits” find the one who, among four lonely spinsters, would suffer grave mental illness?

I’ve felt secret swoons and longings for these girls since I was 8 years old. Erica Hirshler in conversation gives us all permission to fall in love for all time with the painting.

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Terry Teachout’s fine reconsideration of the man called “Pops” solidifies Louis Armstrong’s standing as not just the greatest horn player since the angel Gabriel, but an all-transforming artist at the level of James Joyce or even Shakespeare, and a black American freedom fighter of character and conscience, too.

Louis Armstrong’s power to astonish was never in doubt. Hoagy Carmichael, the songwriter of “Stardust” and “Georgia,” dropped his cigarette and gulped his drink the first time he heard Louis, barely out of his teens, in 1921. “Why,” Hoagy moaned, “isn’t everybody in the world listening to that?” Over the next 50 years the whole world heard Louis, and marveled, but there were always questions, too: Could honky-tonk music from red-light New Orleans get standing, really, with Schubert and Bach? Was Louis in artistic decline after the Twenties? Was he an Uncle Tom in all that Satchelmouth clowning?

All the modern answers as Terry Teachout documents them are over the top now in favor of Louis Armstrong. Listen to the testimonies his fellow horn players Ruby Braff and Wynton Marsalis gave me on Louis’s legendary centennial, July 4, 1900: that if Louis wasn’t actually God, he was at least proof of God. His grandeur, complexity and consistency as man and artist seem now beyond question. Harold Bloom, keeper of the cultural canon and an astute jazz listener, too, pairs Armstrong with Walt Whitman as the greatest American contributor to the world’s art, the genius of this nation at its best. It turns out we could believe our ears after all.

CL: You refer to him at one point as a middlebrow genius, which I think is awfully good, but spell it out.

TT: I used that phrase because Armstrong is a guy whose favorite band leader was Guy Lombardo, a guy who just liked a good tune, who happened to be a culture-changing genius. And he didn’t see why you couldn’t like Guy Lombardo and Caruso and the Beatles and Barbra Streisand, and Joe Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton — he just thought it was all music.

The picture on the cover of my book was taken by Philippe Halsman in 1965. It is an outtake from a session that was photographed for the cover of LIFE, this very famous photo that everybody’s seen of Armstrong with his eyes popping and the horn pointing outward and he’s dressed in this tux. He looks wonderful and he looks like the Armstrong we all know.

In this photograph, Armstrong’s just standing there with a very enigmatic half-smile on his face, holding his horn, dressed beautifully, looking like a man who knows something that maybe we don’t know, a man who knows his complexity, the complications of his own personality, who has seen the world as it is and in a very deep sense has accepted the world as it is.

Armstrong is a man who is at peace with himself. At the very end of his life he sent a letter to a friend that I quote at the end of my book, where he says that ‘my whole life has been happiness and I love everybody.’ And he wasn’t kidding, he really wasn’t kidding.

That kind of acceptance of the fundamental realities of life, not meaning that you don’t want life to be changed, but that you accept the world as it is, and decide that you’re going to make the best of it, that’s really at the heart of his character, and I think of his genius too. It allows him to take in all things in his music and his art, the sadness, the beauty, the joy, the comedy, and make them one.

Terry Teachout in conversation with Chris Lydon, January 8, 2009

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Rick Benjamin says the threshold instruction of most good poems is: slow down, be alert, wake up. The reason to write poetry is to be of use, he says. The reason to read poetry is that it might change your life.

In our series “whose words these are,” on the practice of poetry today, Rick Benjamin stands out as an activist, a communitarian, a Buddhist, a globalist, a family man who’s always telling his kids: “Remember, talk to strangers.”

He lives by Rumi’s line from 13th Century Persia: “The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep.” It’s the idea that gets him up in the morning, and animates his classes at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design on “Poetry in Service to Schools and the Community.”

In an essay on pedagogy, Benjamin writes: “Poets are such good teachers, and their learning catches you in ways that very few other things will. . . . Making poetry is not worth doing if you aren’t trying to bring someone else along with you.”

Q: What’s your favorite poem?

A: Here’s one, but I don’t know if its my favorite poem, because I can’t even pick my favorite meal. I’m just going to say one poem that I know I like a lot. “In Black Water Woods” by Mary Oliver.

Q: What is the talent you most want that you don’t have, yet?

A: I’d like to be a much better glass blower than I am. I dabble in it, but I’m very bad at it. I think I’m too interested in the medium to be good at it – maybe that’s paradoxical. I like paying attention to it so much that when asked to do any of my own work I’m at a loss. I’m kind of a glass-blowing voyeur.

Q: What’s the keynote of your personality as a poet?

A: It would have to be something about circulating love, unabashedly and without embarrassment. The love that we are lucky enough to find in structures like families, in our communities, between countries — to honor it, fully.

Q: Who are your fellow travelers in other mediums?

A: Visual artists like Andy Goldsworthy, who are willing to work with ordinary and organic materials and make something beautiful and impermanent out of them. That’s all I aspire to as a writer, to hope fully with fidelity, make a snapshot of something and know that it will have changed and be gone tomorrow.

Musicians: like poetry, I have a range of music that I really love: some of it is Jazz, people like John Coltrane, and some of it is something more contemporary, like the hiphop music my kids listen to, K’naan.

Q: What is the quality you most prize in a poem?

A: Wisdom. All I ask of a poem is that it has some wisdom, and then my job, I think, is to become a vehicle and vessel and to circulate that wisdom if I have the opportunity and the possibility to do so.

Q: Who is your favorite fiction character of all time?

A: The unnamed narrator in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Q: What is your motto?

A: “I want to love as if my life depends on it, and when the time comes to let it go, I want to let it go and be on to the next thing.”

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Robin Kelley’s superb biography brings the Thelonious Monk story back from the ragged edge to the creative center of American music. And it brings my reading year to a blessedly loving, gorgeously swinging, dissonant, modernist, and utterly one-off climactic note. There may be another jazz biography as thickly detailed, as audibly lyrical, as passionate, as thrilling as this one, but I can’t bring it to mind.

There’s a vastly detailed, fresh take here on an immortal jazz pianist and composer whose life is often remembered as freakish, at best impossibly mysterious. Not that jazz players hadn’t known from the early 1940s that young Monk was a giant, and ever afterward that those odd, distinctive Monk tunes (nearly 100 of them) are the exotic orchid-like treasures of the American song book.

But this was a man who mumbled at the keyboard, got up and danced around it onstage, showed up late and sometimes disappeared; who did time for small drug offenses and famously lost his “cabaret card” required to play in New York jazz joints. This was a man who suffered bipolar disease and finally died in 1982 in the care of the same rich European lady who’d been Charlie Parker’s last refuge almost 30 years earlier. It is an impossibly eccentric story until Robin Kelley fills in the life of an unshakeably original musician, and with endless family detail paints a fresh picture of a consistently generous friend, a revered and attentive son, father and husband, in triumph and trouble.

In this telling Monk emerges as (not least) a heroic African-American Emersonian at the keyboard. Monk’s insistence that “the piano ain’t got no wrong notes!” resonates with Emerson’s war on conformity and consistency. Monk’s stubborn, self-sacrificing attachment to his own aesthetic summons up Emerson’s “trust thyself” wisdom, and his advice that “a man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within.” “To believe your own sound,” (paraphrasing “Self-Reliance”) “… that is genius.” Monk knew.

One of Robin Kelley’s many arguments with the received wisdom on Monk is that, though he was the house pianist at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem after 1941, and a cornerstone of the regeneration of jazz at mid-century, he belongs to no genre, no “period.”

I kind of break with tradition: I don’t see him as part of the bebop movement. I see his harmonic ideas as being fundamental to so-called bebop, but he wasn’t really out of that. He spent more time in the early forties hanging out in these old piano parlors, at James P. Johnson’s house, with the great stride pianists up in Harlem at that time, Clarence Profit, Willie “The Lion” Smith… He learned piano from an African-American woman who lived in his neighborhood named Alberta Simmons. Nobody’d ever heard of her until my book. She was a fabulous stride pianist. She was part of the Clef Club. She knew Eubie Blake and Willie “The Lion” and all these cats. And so, he grew up playing that and maintaining the old stride piano style because of three things.

One, they believed in virtuosity, but virtuosity that is expressed through your individual expression, not just through speed. How could you take a tune that everybody plays, like “Tea for Two,” and really make it sound like you, like your inner soul.

Two, Monk learned from these guys all the tricks that became fundamental to his playing: the bent note, for example. We say “Monk was so amazing because he could bend notes.” Well, wait a second. Listen to James P. Johnson play Mule Walk. He’s bending notes. It’s all about that. Monk learned all that from those guys, the clashing, the minor seconds, they’re playing that stuff back in the twenties.

And then, you mention Monk’s mumbling. Well, Willie “The Lion” Smith said in his own memoir, “if a piano player’s not mumbling or growling, you ain’t doing anything.” That’s old school.

What Monk did was take the oldest, rooted tradition of the piano, in Harlem, New York, all over the country. And then he combined it with a future we have yet to achieve. It’s collapsing space and time. And his whole approach to the piano is one that brings past and present and future together in one. And he had never ever left his roots as a stride pianist — all the way to the very last tune he ever played.

Robin D. G. Kelley in conversation with Chris Lydon, December 18, 2009

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Gordon Wood, the wonderfully plain-spoken Pulitzer and Bancroft prize historian at Brown, thinks that Thomas Jefferson would find Barack Obama obnoxiously, over-reachingly Hamiltonian… and that Alexander Hamilton would likewise dismiss Obama as a Jeffersonian dreamer.

Empire of Liberty is the title of Gordon Wood’s magisterial new history of the early American republic, 1789 to 1815: boom and transformation on our shores, the rise and fall of Napoleon in the wider world. “Empire of Liberty,” Jefferson’s phrase, is also a neat capsule of the contradiction between a republic of free and equal mostly rural yeomen and a hegemonic global idea wrapped into the American flag. But Jefferson, the libertarian and slave-holder, was nothing if not paradoxical: he was a small-government man and a devotee of peace, but he would have been happy to see the French Revolution invade England, end monarchy and free the world.

CL: Gordon Wood, if there’s a connection to be made across more than two centuries to the “realism” and “idealism” of President Obama’s peace-prize speech, you’re the man to make it.

GW: If we can talk about these historical characters having present-day relevance, which Americans like to do, which is strange in itself. People ask me, what would George Washington think of the invasion of Iraq! … Hamilton would think it was too Jeffersonian. In the sense that he’s already intending to pull out, he’s really making that promise to cover his base, his democratic base, and that his intentions in Afghanistan are essentially to get out in the best way possible, without creating too many political problems for himself. I think Hamilton would take that rather cynical view of what Obama is doing. Jefferson I think would believe that we should avoid war at all costs and I think he would be in favor of getting out.

CL: Your book underlines for me what seems to me the main, if largely unspoken tension in our policy and politics today, which is the difference between the republic that the founders put together in Philadelphia (“if you can keep it,” Ben Franklin said) and a notion of an ambitious world empire.

GW: Well I think obviously Hamilton would be most pleased with the modern America: huge burocracy. He would love the Pentagon, the CIA, all of the million plus men and women under arms. This was what he dreamed of : that we would be a great power. Jefferson would be appalled by the extent of Presidential power for example, and just general Federal governmental power would appall him. But I think he would also believe that we have tried to maintain our sense of ourselves as being the spokesmen for democracy in the world, and that’s been an important part of our history. The critics of Bush were appalled not so much by the use of troops, but it was the torture, it was the brutality, the un-American aspects of the War on Terror that bothered a lot of people. Jefferson would have been on that side.

Idealism comes out of the Jeffersonian tradition. We’re full of paradoxes. Jefferson himself is the greatest paradox in American history: that our supreme spokesman for democracy should be a shaveholding aristocrat has to be ironic. And he is a spokesman for democracy. He did believe at heart that every person is the same. Not just that people are created equal — everyone can belive that, and everyone did in the 18th century — but Jefferson believed that despite the inequalities you could see everywhere in our society, beneath the surface, at bottom, we were all the same. And he included slaves in this. That makes him a spokesman for democracy.

I think Obama had a little bit of Hamilton and a little bit of Jefferson in that speech. He’s a peacenik, but he’s also a realist in that speech. That is, he says: “there’s evil in the world and war comes out of that evil.” Jefferson would not have believed that. Jefferson was devoted to the idea that we could eliminate war, we could eliminate the use of military force. Hamilton, on the other hand, is the realist. He says “no, war is not caused by monarchies. War is caused by human nature. There are evil people.” So there was a little bit of each — a little Hamilton, a little Jefferson, a little realism, a little idealism — in that Nobel Prize speech.

Gordon Wood in conversation with Chris Lydon in Providence, December 17, 2009

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Sir Andrew Motion succeeded Dryden, Wordsworth, Tennyson and, immediately, Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. He can sound like the elegist of rural old imperial England, but he can sting in the present tense too, on matters from Princess Di to the “scream of rocket-burn” in the war on Iraq. “Harrowing clarity” is his stated goal. He laughs with us about trying to write poetry that looks like water and bites like gin.

We are doing a little comparison shopping across the old pond in our poetry series. Andrew Motion speaks for the far shore of the “two peoples separated by a common language,” in G. B. Shaw’s famous line. His volume of new and selected poems, The Mower, traces a personal and national past without shrinking from a quickly shifting British future. In our conversation, he sounds comfortable living and writing at the meeting of forward and backward gazes.

Introducing The Mower, Langdon Hammer of Yale notes the feeling that Motion describes in his memoir of childhood, In the Blood, as an “evening-mixture of sad and safe.” Hammer explains:

The feeling involves a turning away from modernity and modernization, but it implies for the same reason a specifically modern attitude. That attitude is central to the way in which modern English culture has tended to define Englishness. In this tradition … moral realism and verbal precision, especially in description, balance the potential for vague idealism and naive patriotism. skepticism guards against self-pity …. Feeling is expressed through a carefully calibrated reticence.

Andrew Motion acknowledges with us the ambition to capture in his formal and outwardly quotidian verse his own and his parents’ experience of six pivotal British decades:

A lot of the subjects of my poems are on the face of it very personal — they’re poems about my partner, they’re poems about my childhood, they’re poems about my mother in particular, they’re poems about my father, they’re poems about what happens to me in a rolling way — but I’ve always thought that the very large amount of my time that I spend engaged with the political things around my writing is evident here … a sense of England mutating from being one kind of society into another one. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m sort of lingeringly, damp-eyedly peering back at a golden age and wishing that it would come back again. That’s very much not my political position. I feel very much engaged with the here and now. As I say that, I also feel very struck of course by living at the moment where the old imperial idea of the UK gave way to something else.

Andrew Motion in New York City with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, 12.16.09.