Notes

I’ve chosen to draw an optimistic conclusion, from the analogy of eyeglasses. Before corrective lenses were invented, some 700 years ago, bad eyesight was a profound handicap. In effect it meant being disconnected from the wider world, since it was hard to take in knowledge. With eyeglasses, this aspect of human fitness no longer mattered in most of what people did. More people could compete, contribute, and be fulfilled. …

It could be the same with these new computerized aids to cognition. … Increasingly we all will be able to look up anything, at any time—and, with categorization, get a head start in thinking about connections.

But in Nicholas Carr’s July 2008 piece “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” he was troubled by search engines’ treatment of information as “a utilitarian resource to be mined and processed with industrial efficiency.” And he questioned the idea that artificial intelligence would make people’s lives better:

It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

Even as Carr appreciated the ease of online research, he felt the web was “chipping away [his] capacity for concentration and contemplation.” It was as if the rote tasks of research and recall, far from wasting innovators’ time, were actually the building blocks of more creative, complex thought.

On the other hand, “you should be skeptical of my skepticism,” as Carr put it. And from the beginning, one great benefit of the internet was that it brought people in contact not just with information, but with other people’s ideas. In April 2016, Adrienne LaFrance reflected on “How Early Computer Games Influenced Internet Culture”:

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, game makers—like anyone who found themselves tinkering with computers at the time—were inclined to share what they learned, and to build on one another’s designs.  … That same culture, and the premium it placed on openness, would eventually carry over to the early web: a platform that anyone could build on, that no one person or company could own. That idea is at the heart of what proponents for net neutrality are trying to protect—that is, the belief that openness is a central value, perhaps even the foundational value, of what is arguably the most important technology of our time.

But as tech culture evolved and pervaded life outside the web, even its problem-solving methods began to seem reductive at times. Ian Bogost outlined that paradox in November 2016 when a new product called ketchup leather was billed as the “solution” to soggy burgers:

The technology critic Evgeny Morozov calls this sort of thinking “solutionism”—the belief that all problems can be solved by a single and simple technological solution. … Morozov is concerned about solutionism because it recasts social conditions that demand deeper philosophical and political consideration as simple hurdles for technology. …

But solutionism has another, subtler downside: It trains us to see everything as a problem in the first place. Not just urban transit or productivity, but even hamburgers. Even ketchup!

So, what’s your personal experience of how the internet affects creativity? Can you point to a digital distraction—Netflix, say, or Flappy Bird—that’s enriched your thinking in other areas of your life? On the flip side of the debate, can you point to a tool like email or Slack that’s sharpened your efficiency but narrowed the scope of your ideas? We’d like to hear your stories; please send us a note: hello@theatlantic.com.

b. It’s normal in English for adjectives to precede the subject noun, although there are many instances when it might follow, e.g. “athlete extraordinaire,” “the person responsible,” “battle royal,” “devil incarnate.”

Thus, the NP (noun phrase) “croissants uneaten” could just as easily be construed as “uneaten croissants” and, as shown above, “uneaten croissants” can arguably be construed as an adjective-noun combination. Therefore it’s arguable that “croissants uneaten” is also an adjective-noun combination, with the adjective following the noun.

c. Your correspondent J. also makes this argument:

Although it appears in many of the same syntactic positions as adjectives, uneaten does not meet most of the criteria for adjective-hood (an asterisk indicates that something is ungrammatical):

• It is not gradable: *more uneaten, *most uneaten
• It cannot be modified by words like too and very: *very uneaten croissants
• It doesn’t work with a verb like become: *The croissants became uneaten.

I don’t think that’s the way to look at it. The adjective uneaten has a binary meaning, i.e. something is either eaten or it’s not. (We’ll ignore the brief interim during which it is transitioning between the two states.) Thus, eaten is an absolute state, as is uneaten.

Consequently, adverbs of gradation (more, most, too, very) simply don’t apply. This is precisely parallel to the rule that tells us not to modify the adjective unique with the adverbs very, more, etc., since ‘unique’ is absolute.

Now, can we say that something is “partially eaten” (and therefore “partially uneaten”)? Of course, but it is understood that the part that is eaten is absolutely eaten, and the part that is uneaten is absolutely uneaten.

As for “The croissants became uneaten,” of course we don’t say it that way, but saying

Sentence 2:  The croissants were eaten.

conveys the same meaning, except with more felicity.

d. Finally, as to this comment:

To get a better sense of all of this, compare uneaten to a past participle that has clearly become an adjective, like embarrassed.

The adjective embarrassed is not used in a binary-state way. One could argue that one is either embarrassed or one is not, but the fact is that we do modify this adjective in a gradation:

Sentence 3:   I was slightly/somewhat/quite/greatly/mortifyingly embarrassed.

Conclusion: My arguments lead me to assert that “croissants uneaten” is an acceptable English noun phrase and that uneaten is not a verb, but an adjective.

Personally I’m on the side of the adjectives—though I take full responsibility for having prompted this debate by advertising uneaten as a verb in the first place. I draw this conclusion not only from the guidance of my trusty arbiter, the Merriam-Webster dictionary (or just Merriam, as my college friends and I called her), but also from the fact that I’m unable to translate “croissants were uneaten” into an equivalent construction using the active verb uneat. (Side note: If anyone out there has found a way to boldly uneat where everyone else has eaten before, please let me know: My colleagues share a lot of snacks here at The Atlantic, and I’m constantly late to the party. (Side note to the side note: If there’s no such thing as a split infinitive, what happens if you try to split an infinitive that doesn’t exist?))

But I’ll give J. this: In “Walking Dead autopsied, croissants uneaten,” uneaten does work in parallel with autopsied—each describes what’s being done, respectively, to the hit TV show and the croissants. Though uneaten may not be a verb itself, it functions in context as a past participle. That, anyway, was my excuse when I tried to pass it off as one.

I know it might seem petty, or trollish, or a waste of everyone’s valuable time to spend these paragraphs arguing over the character of a single word. (Apologies to my editor.) But this debate underscores for me something much bigger, and more important: A word, as Knox pointed out last week, is functional—a mechanism for meaning-delivery. But it’s not a machine; the right metaphor, I think, would be something much closer to human. A word has an essential identity in its definition, and carries that everywhere; and yet it’s a shape-shifter, context changing its meaning and its grammatical function. Words are like people— multifaceted and messy and hard to pin down. And isn’t that kind of beautiful?

With the news landscape so fragmented, it’s really hard to solve this problem. I can ignore the traditional gate keepers like NYT and WaPo, and I can confirm all my biases on platforms such as Breitbart or DailyKos. Can we overcome that fragmentation? I think so.

Ultimately I believe it comes down to the need to return to hard-nosed investigative journalism, and putting out fewer opinion pieces. So, say Trump goes forward with his tariffs on Mexico. Well it may help the Rust Belt workers, but it will be detrimental to workers in border towns. So you’d want a reporter talking to people and businesses affected. It’s kind of hard to ignore these stories vs. opinion pieces.

In general, to overcome the cultural malaise that led to Trump, we’re going to need more dialogue across communities. The goal is to build a common “meta-narrative” that post-modernity tears down. We need grassroots activity and the revival of social institutions (churches/mosques/synagogues, mutual aid societies, neighborhood councils, etc.). So it just comes down to countering balkanization in media, culture, and politics.

This next reader has a very different view:

“The American free press” consists of some of the largest businesses in the world, huge corporations worth billions of dollars, the unregulated “fifth estate” in America. They are more powerful than politicians or representatives, free to say anything under the guise of “freedom of the press.”

They are no longer really “the press”; they represent the interests of the owners who, through their exposure to many millions of people, have power even beyond that of the president or elected representatives.

Let’s get real. The idea of what is happening in the world is what is presented to you by the media. You see “reality” through their lens. What they say seems to be the same as fact. They really control what you think! The Washington Post endlessly disses Trump, gives his critics more coverage mix fact with opinion, and distort facts. They are manipulating you.

Not so fast, replies this reader:

Or alternately, you could simply apply rational thought to what you read and draw rational conclusions based on the quality of evidence provided, the number of peer sources co-validating it, and the logic of the arguments presented. Or just buy into unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that everything is a lie.

Another reader piles on:

Newspapers like The Washington Post provide sources; Trump never does, unless it’s his own gold-plated observation—like the phantom thousands of people in New Jersey whom he saw cheer on 9/11. The major newspapers also apologize and issue corrections when they make an error; Trump will do the same only when Mar-a-Lago freezes over. And lastly, Trump provides us all with seemingly never-ending examples of distortion, insults, and unethical sexual behavior. Trump is manipulating his penurious lemmings and then spits nails after the majority of the American people resist him.

Update from a reader who suggests that part of the problem is that online media is too democratized:

Very interesting article by Frum and the follow-up posts by readers. I want to add that the rise of Twitter is a major factor in this. It allows people (like Trump) to reach his target audience, unchecked. Any nuance or fact checking or hard questions cannot be condensed into 140 or whatever the Twitter character limit is.

It also promotes people like Milo Yiannopoulos who have nothing valuable to contribute but instead are ready to throw verbal molotov cocktails and watch the world burn. There is no accountability, therefore no need to be truthful.

Let me also pose this question: Why are all of us equipped to comment on news and what’s happening in the world? We don’t let all of us build rockets or do neurosurgery. So why does that standard of having sense, education, training, and aptitude apply to being a journalist? Having a blog—or worse, a collection of loony opinions like Breitbart—is not journalism.

Secondly, he was willing to stand firm against great pressure within his party against the American with Disabilities Act (ADA). Instead, he recognized the need to give individuals with disabilities the opportunity to function independently, thus empowering many who otherwise would be homebound.

Third, he was willing to stand firm against tyranny when Saddam Hussain invaded Kuwait. He worked carefully and wisely to merge together a coalition of more than thirty countries to remove Iraqi forces and liberate Kuwait in under four months.

Lastly, he was willing again, against great pressure, to acknowledge the need to increase taxes—which would eventually lose him a second term.

On a similar note, Mary Shannahan chose President Jimmy Carter because he “walks his talk”:

I admire him because of his integrity while in office. Since his term ended, he’s facilitated  peace on a global level and supervised integrity, or lack of it, in elections throughout the world. Here in the States he’s active with Habitat for Humanity. His principles are guided by his faith.

From Jennifer Poulakidas: “LBJ, for sure”:

What President Johnson was able to accomplish during his tenure is undeniably amazing and advanced our country in many very significant ways. AND, he was able to get a majority of the Congress to join him! The Civil Rights Acts, the Voting Rights Act, the first ESEA and HEA bills, the Immigration Act of 1965, the establishment of Head Start, Medicare, Medicaid and Work Study, creation of the National Endowments of Humanities and the Arts—the list could continue.

Paul E. Doherty suggested President Harry Truman, who he calls a real “man’s man.” Why?

He probably made more difficult decisions than any other president, and right or wrong, he made them in the best interest of our country. He truly meant it with the sign on his desk in the Oval Office that said “The Buck Stops Here!” After leaving the White House he went back to Independence, Missouri, to live the rest of his life with his family.  Truly a great American!

Reader Cindy Simpson would have some questions for FDR:

If he were in office today, he’d probably be impeached: Did he know about Pearl Harbor? If so, when, and if not, why? And what about those affairs—for both him and his wife?

But I admire Franklin D. Roosevelt. I believe he led this country through a very difficult time—he helped to get people relief and employment during and after the Great Depression; established social security, the SEC, and the FDIC; and navigated the U.S. entry into WWII (though of course, it wasn’t all good).

For college student Zubair Merchant, it’s a tossup between two young presidents, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama:

Both men had a passion and honor in office that I think is characteristically unique to them. It also helps that they were young and inspirational presidents and that I am in college.

I think that 50 percent of the presidency is policy and 50 percent is rhetoric. On the policy side you can debate that JFK didn’t have time to do much, yet Obama (I believe) moved this country forward in a way that we haven’t seen in a long time (he’s the liberal Reagan, but cooler). On the rhetoric front, they are, in my view, the most inspirational presidents in history, and their youth carried a message that is unparalleled.

Finally, Christopher Wilson didn’t support Barack Obama during his candidacy, but says he still admires him the most—“without question”:

When someone is observed with such scrutiny and vigilance, they cannot escape their faults.  President Obama had his.  The pivot of his leadership was changing an opinion of what had been a strong conviction—not for the purpose of politics and remembrance—but because he knew it was the right thing to do!  Specifically, having held strong opposing views of [same-sex marriage], President Obama made a remarkable turnaround and went full throttle in securing rights and becoming a quiet champion for the community—this in spite of his own personal beliefs.  That’s rarely seen in politics, and applaudable.

Lastly, he gave the face of the president its most human touch.  His humor, casual style, personal interests, candor and confidence were his beauty.  I, like many others were able to connect with and see him for who he was ... a great father, husband, brother, uncle, son, friend and human being.

Thanks for your comments, and stay tuned for next week’s Question of the Week contest.

In this example

Walking Dead autopsied, croissants uneaten, scare machine terrifies, diva reigns Supreme.

You have what are clearly four verbs. Despite some readers’ desire for parallelism, there is nothing wrong or inelegant about having two past participles and two present-tense verbs.

In this example

Press unimpressed, sugar scientists soured, identity swiped, figures add up.

You have four clear verbs. Does unimpressed straddle the line between verb and adjective? Probably. But isn’t there a verbal meaning there, i.e., that the press was unimpressed by someone or something, that someone or something did not impress them?

***

And I know that it’s frowned-upon to start a sentence with “and”

But it’s not. The “don’t start sentences with conjunctions” is a zombie rule. It has never been an actual rule of English grammar, and it’s easy to find examples of it in all levels of formality, from Supreme Court decisions to essays in The Atlantic to newspaper articles to fiction to social-media posts.

***

On the other hand, isn’t language shaped democratically by those who use it?

YES!

***

So tell me: Are you a grammar geek who takes occasional guilty pleasure in splitting infinitives? Do you dare to dangle prepositions?

With all due respect, this is the kind of stuff that perpetuates zombie rules. It perpetuates ignorance about the way our language works.

There is no “guilty pleasure” in “splitting” infinitives because it has never been ungrammatical in English. And anyway, “split infinitive” is a misnomer, one borne of early grammarians’ attempts to apply the grammatical rules of Latin (in which is is impossible to split an infinitive) to English. A to-infinitive clearly comprises two parts: the infinitival subordinator to and the plain form of the verb. This is clear in sentences like “I need to eat and sleep” and “We could go to the dance, but Cozznester doesn’t want to.” Nothing is being split in a “split infinitive.”

As for preposition stranding: That too has never been ungrammatical in English. Its proscription is another zombie rule, this one borne of an offhand comment by poet John Dryden hundreds of years ago.

When you suggest that splitting infinitives and stranding prepositions is something that only grammar renegades do—especially when you do it in a widely read publication—you’re adding fuel to people's misconceptions (and their nervous cluelessness) about English. There’s no guilty pleasure in doing these things: They’re a natural part of English grammar. There are conventions that formal writing must adhere to. But conflating stylistic conventions with grammar leads people to believe that those conventions are actual rules.

I’m aware that this piece is trying to be light, to adopt a cheeky tone. But people who write about language need to battle the misinformed pedantry of the peevers. They need to strive to show readers how English actually works, not how those peevers want it to work.

Point taken. And gauntlet thrown.

Searching for further insight into stylistic peevery, I followed one of J.’s links to discover Britt Peterson’s 2014 Boston Globe column “Why We Love the Language Police.” Here’s Peterson’s central question:

It’s long been recognized that language is culturally contingent and constantly evolving, rather than being a strict, logical system that can be frozen in its 16th-century state, as [grammarian N.M.] Gwynne would have it.

And yet the enthusiasm with which people read Gwynne suggests that, outside academia, there’s some continuing appeal in being lectured about split infinitives and misplaced apostrophes. In fact, for hundreds of years, English-speakers have reveled in scolding each other and being scolded about language. Gwynne’s little book is just the latest to put the spotlight on an enduring conundrum: In a world where hundreds of millions of people use the language effectively every day, why do so many of us love to hear that we’re doing it wrong?

Proud pedants and peevers come forward: What’s so great about your usage rules? Can you defend against the charge of spreading misconceptions? If there’s no grammatical case against (for instance) a split infinitive, what’s the aesthetic one? Send your best case for conventions to hello@theatlantic.com.

As my colleague Joseph knows after fielding my not-so-correct attempt to correct him, I still have trouble understanding how the phrase “to jibe with” can reasonably signify agreement. My editor, Chris, can attest to my habit of putting commas in places where they are unwelcome, if not strictly prohibited (it’s for the musicality, I have oh-so-earnestly told him). And I know that it’s frowned-upon to start a sentence with “and” or follow a semicolon with “but”; but there are times when for reasons of cadence or tone it just feels right to do it. I know that “but it sounds good!” is not much of a logical argument for anything—but such is the logic to which I bow, time and time again.

I blame my education for the crisis of faith. In college, I divided my time between copy-editing jobs and creative-writing workshops, developing equal reverence for protocol and for experimentation. I also earned a degree in literature, which means I am now well acquainted with the glorious multitude of things one can do with the English language, extremely skilled at overthinking the meaning behind a particular comma, and—when it comes to my own writing—desperately confused. Forget grammar-Nazism: Communication is a kind of social contract, and there’s an egalitarian rightness to holding all writers to the same standards. On the other hand, isn’t language shaped democratically by those who use it? And art is a meritocracy anyway, and creativity means pushing limits, and where’s the danger and joy and intuitive magic in playing strictly by the rules?

I like to think I’m not alone in all this agita. So tell me: Are you a grammar geek who takes occasional guilty pleasure in splitting infinitives? Do you dare to dangle prepositions? Are your serial commas (however you feel about them) selectively enforced? Send your copy confessions my way: hello@theatlantic.com.

This is a good question, but unfortunately I don’t have a great answer. It’s possible that Trump will convince more companies to manufacture here. The voters I talked to certainly think he is doing a good job so far. He is really good at making independent business decisions sound like they were because of him. If he does this, I think he’s going to keep a strong contingent of happy voters in the Rust Belt.

But a lot of these manufacturing jobs are going to be automated, and so that’s not going to help these voters in the long term. The automation could take a decade or so, though, so it may not be relevant for 2020.

However, as I wrote in my piece from Elkhart [“It’s Not About the Economy”], economic progress doesn’t necessarily mean voters will support the president. People live in bubbles of their own making, and they often don’t let facts disrupt their narrative of what is going on. (Liberals too!)

I really liked your article last November about the Democrats not having an easy answer for the Rust Belt. So my question is: Is there actually a pitch the Democrats can make that will work? Trump is promising the moon, and while I don’t think he can deliver, it seems like an impossible promise to compete against.

I think the pitch that will work is not the most sensible one, which is training and education. Rather, I think if somehow Democrats can go more progressive, towards a “growth-that-includes everyone” type of message, that could be more appealing, especially to one-time union voters. That might mean talking more about employee-owned companies, or about the importance of unions, or of making business share more profits.

I liked your piece about the TPP and its real impact on the American worker, but it’s interesting how few people in the Rust Belt seem to understand these concepts. Where do you think the disconnect in communication and understanding is? Is there a better way for to get these topics across?

That’s a really good question. I think that’s another thing I’ve really learned while talking to people across the country: People often believe the version of economics that’s simplest. So, “your job is being outsourced to Mexico” is easier to get angry about than “TPP would have raised wages overseas, which in turn could have driven companies to relocate to the U.S., which in turn would have created jobs here.” People in the Rust Belt really hate NAFTA and it’s going to be hard to change their mind about trade.

Seeing that the Trump administration has so far been rather, let’s say, incompetent, do you think he’ll actually be able to impose the trade restrictions he wants? And how do you think they’ll play out if they do indeed happen?

I think that for the next two years, if past is prologue, Trump is going to do pretty much whatever he wants. He already killed TPP. Renegotiating NAFTA is going to be harder, but I think the administration is very serious about this border adjustment tax. The good thing for Democrats, I think, is that most of these trade policies are going to be an absolute disaster for the economy. It’s worrying that Trump does not seem to want to listen to economists, but this will be an interesting experiment in what happens when a country does not follow widely-accepted economic principles.

Do you think the extremely polarizing nature of Trump will make the communities you visited more insular and defensive, and only deepen the divide in America? If so, if there anything that could be done to mitigate this? Is there anything the media could do on this front?

Yes, I do think the divide is going to deepen. People have beliefs about the country and the president and they are going to seek out news sources that confirm those beliefs. So people who like Trump are going to read things saying he’s doing a good job, and those that don’t are going to consume things saying he’s terrible.

I think local newspapers are important here. People care about what’s happening in their communities and still consume local news. So the degree that those papers can burst through those bubbles and share facts, that’s pretty important.

I was recently reading a New Yorker article about how a man from rural America who said he hated black people started up a discussion on C-SPAN with the head of Demos, who is black.

They’re now friends, and McGhee recommended that the man read up on black history and get to know more black people, which he did. I think the more people read up on people very different from them, and make contacts with those people, the better (yes, I realize this sounds very Kumbaya). I am trying to read Hillbilly Elegy right now (though I am not making much progress), and I want to read more about people in rural areas, even as I do more reporting there.

Something I’m always curious about, particularly from writers such as yourself: Do you think online commenting provides an opportunity to bridge some of these economic/educational/cultural divides or does it just widen the gulf? TAD was founded as an escape from the usual fracas of online comment boards, but I’m curious what role you think open online comments plays in today’s America.

If you mean commenting on sites like The Atlantic, I’m not sure that it can bridge the gulf. Many of the Republicans I talk to in the Rust Belt have never heard of The Atlantic and certainly would never read it. They have their news sources; Democrats have theirs.

I’ve thought a lot about how to bridge the divide I wrote about in “America’s Great Divergence,” and I just don’t have an idea. I do know that the opinions and input of people different from me are really important in my reporting, but I usually get those inputs by visiting somewhere really far away and talking to random people. I’d love to have more of those people in my Facebook feed, but I just don’t.

“I’d love to have more of those people in my Facebook feed, but I just don’t.”
I think that’s a really great point. Elsewhere on TAD today it was mentioned that Vox was reporting only 9 percent of Republicans disapprove of Trump right now. Which isn’t surprising in and of itself, but it did strike me how everything I’ve seen lately, through social media and through the news sources I regularly read, has been so negative about Trump that you’d think the entire country turned on him. It’s an important reminder that there really is another world out there that is easy to completely miss.

What do you think will be the most underreported, yet necessary economic/business reporting of the coming year?

I think the middle class is going to continue to hollow out, no matter what Trump does. People at the high-skill, educated end of the spectrum are going to do great, everyone else is going to continue to scrimp. Especially with GOP control in the nation and in many states, there’s going to be little appetite for raising the minimum wage in many places, and there’s likely to be more rollback of union protections. (I believe Iowa is considering scrapping collective bargaining.)

I also think that Trump’s changes to the tax codes, whatever they end up being, are going to be a big deal. So many economists I talk to say the way to lessen income inequality is to raise taxes on the rich. That is definitely not going to happen now.

Is there anything you can share about any big (or little, or anything in between) stories you’ve got coming up? Do you see your writing taking a specific shape under the Trump administration that maybe you wouldn’t have expected last October?

Yea, for better or worse, Trump dominates the news cycle, and he is what people are interested in reading about. I’m interested in what will happen if Trump dismantles regulations to make things easier for business, especially in the environmental arena. I think a lot of journalists are wary of writing stories for four years that are basically “Trump just announced a policy that is dumb. Here is why,” but on the other hand, you can’t ignore when he puts forth things that fly in the face of decades of economic thinking.

I am always open to story ideas about the new world we live in, so if you have any things you’d like to see us cover, shoot!

For one thing, he was a local boy made good: Born and raised in Northampton, Mass., where his father ran a dairy farm, he was a fixture for many years in Boston and its environs, home base to the august bewhiskered poets who founded the magazine in 1857. His editor at Boston’s Houghton Mifflin for several of his celebrated collections was Peter Davison, the Atlantic’s late longtime poetry editor and literary lion of parts. His work appeared early and often in these pages over those years, immediately recognizable for its mordant wit, offbeat verve, and matchless knack for musing beguilingly on just about anything. The only predictable trait of a Lux poem was that it would be the one and only thing of its kind.

It’s the weariest of clichés to say that a certain poet sounds like none other. Lux was the real McCoy. It’s there in the deadpan delivery, the sure comic timing, the live-wire ear for oddball lingo and kooky hearsay, the slyboots way of spinning tall tales out of small talk. His bittersweet satirical bent belongs to no school or tribe; his smarts and chops were his and his alone. Is there another American poet since Stevens who conjured up so many humdinger titles? Could anyone else have composed an ode to the secret life-force of a punctuation mark? Was there ever a laconic elegy for long-gone summertimes quite as definitively disarming as “The Man Into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball”?

Not by our lights.