We have fallen from the Garden, and the Garden itself—nature conceived as an inviolate wilderness—is pocked with nuclear waste and toxic dumps, at the mercy of industry and Watt, all of it open to nuclear defilement. Generations come and go, but the earth abideth forever is something we need to feel, one of the foundations of poetry and humanness, and now we are not sure. That is the problem with nuclear threat, simply as threat; it under mines all certainty, and things once absolute are now contingent. To feel that one’s private life was in the hands of God, or Fate, or even History, allowed the self a margin of transcendence, the dignity of personal life was part of a great if mysterious Order. But now our lives are in the hands of a few men in the Pentagon and the Kremlin, men who, having affirmed that they would destroy us to save us, have certified their madness-and yet their will determines our lives and our deaths. We are, then, quite literally enslaved, and assuming that this bothers poets no less than the rest of us, why do they so seldom speak of it?1

中文翻译：

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预感颤抖：卷。47, No. 3, Spring 1985

我们从花园里掉了下来，而花园本身——大自然被认为是一个不可侵犯的荒野——布满了核废料和有毒垃圾场，受工业和瓦特的摆布，所有这些都对核污染开放。世代来来去去，但地球永存是我们需要感受的东西，诗歌和人性的基础之一，现在我们不确定。这就是核威胁的问题，简单来说就是威胁；它在我的所有确定之下，曾经绝对的事情现在是偶然的。感觉一个人的私人生活掌握在上帝、命运甚至历史的手中，让自我有超越的边缘，个人生活的尊严是一个伟大而神秘的秩序的一部分。但是现在我们的生命掌握在五角大楼和克里姆林宫的几个人手中，他们已经确认他们会为了拯救我们而摧毁我们，证明了他们的疯狂——然而他们的意志决定了我们的生死。那么，我们真的是被奴役了，假设这对诗人的困扰不亚于我们其他人，为什么他们很少谈论它？1