Great Regulars: The closing stanza follows the badger's vivid

last battle and death with an eerie postlude: The account of the animal tamed like a dog, with the poignant phrase "tries to play." These two framing stanzas can be judged either to blunt the effect of the narrative they bracket or to enrich it. In their relatively detached narrative surface, these stanzas are the opposite of "I Am," with its declarative, first-person force.

[by John Clare]

"The Badger"

from Robert Pinsky: Slate: "The Self-Consumer of My Woes"

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The "fluid, transitional nature of communication" during printing's first heyday naturally attracted detractors. "This is what the printing presses do: they corrupt susceptible hearts" wrote the "dyspeptic Benedictine" Filippo de Strata. Clumsy and unreliable editions led to "the charge that print had debased the book." By making book ownership more common, print also "diminished the lustre of the Renaissance library," causing many collections to dwindle or dissolve altogether as "the library as a cultural institution struggled to adapt to the new age."

from Robert Pinsky: The New York Times: Start the Presses

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