unimproved

Everything since Homer has improved, except poetry.

—Giacomo Leopardi, “Zibaldone di pensieri” (Poetry: November 1, 2010) translated from the Italian by W.S. Di Piero.

return to song

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting
“Which Side Are You On?”
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row

—Bob Dylan, "Desolation Row"

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016