Against Roosevelt I place John Ashbery, whose poem “Soonest Mended” is the greatest summation I know of the way uncertainty and revelation can mingle, without dissolving together, in the human mind. It’s a more complex and accurate portrait of life’s enterprise than Roosevelt’s hard-charging man’s man, sore and broken but never doubting his direction. Ashbery’s sad-comic vision of citizenship might almost be a reply to Roosevelt’s “Citizenship in a Republic”: And you see, both of us were right, though nothing Has somehow come to nothing; the avatars Of our conforming to the rules and living
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