News at Eleven: Such a conversation might not take place

elsewhere on the continent, but Mr. Simic points out some broader differences between American and European approaches to poetry. "In Europe poetry has always been a literary undertaking, it's really part of literature," Mr. Simic says. "If you write poetry in a serious way you are participating in a very long tradition, over a thousand years . . . they don't have, for example, the tradition of confessional poetry, they never had a Walt Whitman."

from The Wall Street Journal: The Immigrant 'Outsider' Is Now Poetry's Insider

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