Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a litera...ry aristocracy of one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was a heavy burden on the conscience to know that while you sat in Music 101, some contemporary--as "worthy" of a college educa...tion as you were, but one who had been denied the opportunity because he was poor, or black, or both--was getting his head blown off in Vietnam. Many students believed that such inequity was wrong, but couldn't bring themselves to redress it personally by refusing the student deferment. It's a dreadful combination: to act for self-protection yet at the same time to loathe oneself for acting that way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bou...rgeois profundity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
His ear is so sensitively attuned to the bugle note of history that he is often deaf to the more raucous clamour of contemporary l...ife.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Defining and celebrating the New Father are by far the most popular ideas in our contemporary discourse on fatherhood. Father as c...lose and nurturing, not distant and authoritarian. Fatherhood as more than bread winning. Fatherhood as new-and-improved masculinity. Fathers unafraid of feelings. Fathers without sexism. Fatherhood as fifty-fifty parenthood, undistorted by arbitrary gender divisions or stifling social roles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making cont...act with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... black progress and progress for women are inextricably linked in contemporary American politics, and ... each group suffers wh...en it fails to grasp the dimensions of the other's struggle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of... change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers.... Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even assuming the possibility of greater knowledge among responsive young children of a mass media age, it is questionable whether... an increase in verbal knowledge and expression has much effect on the capacity for understanding in depth or on the style of behavior of children with no more than five years of living and growing behind them.... The drawings of contemporary fives are no more complex, the capacity for judgment no sharper, the feelings of helplessness when they get sick or into trouble no less painful than they have ever been, as far as we know.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »