At last, today, we can talk about something else— about rock and roll again, for example, or about the relative merits of green and black tea, about anything that we know will have nothing to do with the national perils and chances that kept us fixed, like greyhounds in harness, despite ourselves, on the tracks of the polls, of the ground game, of cellphones and robocalls, of the neck and neck, the face to face, the fears we harbored all year for the winner in that great race where two hundred million people could join, or jeer. At last we know who won, and we can turn our attention to something within our expertise, to something like the parks and recreation the verse of the past opens for us on sunnier days. We can: but I don’t want to. I want a song as old as Rome, as new as Twitter, and I want to revive the parched, beat-up idea that song is now as it has always been: if this one sounds too old, that’s as may be— should it fade, soon enough another will take its place.
— After Virgil by Stephen Burt
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