Evidence of Things Not Seen

In plotting the format of the present work, composed mostly in 1997, I chose 36 texts by 24 authors. Wystan Auden, Paul Goodman (a childhood idol), and Walt Whitman, all of whom I had used dozens of times before, are here represented by five, four, and three poems each. William Penn, who, as we Quakers say, speaks to my condition, is represented by two prose selections, as are Stephen Crane and the eighteenth-century hymnodist Thomas Ken. The other eighteen authors provide one song each. The sendoff by Roethke, "From Whence Cometh Song," I used once before in another version, and would not have set it again, but no other poem seemed more apt. The verses of Wordsworth, Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett, though world famous, are new to my pen. Edna Millay, another childhood idol, remains close to my heart. Like Penn, John Woolman was a Quaker thinker whose prose dates from the early 1700s; his pacifism, like that of the more ironic Langston Hughes, contrasts with the sometimes warlike Kipling. Kipling's contemporary countrymen, Oscar Wilde and A. E. Housman, with their Victorian poignancy, contrast in turn with the American poignancy of the very late Jane Kenyon. The prose passages fro