So the first thing about the history of rhyme, and the all-important Rhymesters' Rebellion of 1697, is that it's all happened before. It's all part of these huge rhymeorhythmic circles of exuberance and innovation and surfeit and decay and resurrectional primitivism and waxing sophistication and infill and overgrowth and too much and we can't stand it and let's stop and do something else.

LET'S TRY AGAIN. The history of poetry began, quite possibly, in the year 1883. Let me write that date for you with my Sharpie, so you can have it for your convenience. 1883. That's when it all began. Or maybe not. Could be any year. The year doesn't matter. Forget the year! The important thing is that there's something called the nineteenth century, which is like a huge forest of old-growth birch and beech. That's what they used to make clothespins out of, birch and beech. New England was the clothespin-manufacturing capital of the world. There was a factory in Vanceborough, Maine, that made eight hundred clothespins a minute in 1883. Those clothespins went out to England, to France, to Spain, to practically every country in the world. Clothes in every country were stretched out on rope to dry in the sun and held in place by New England clothespins. Elizabeth Barrett Browning probably used New England clothespins. I'm not kidding.

And the way that we write the nineteenth century on a piece of paper is we go "19" and then we do a special little thing on top. A nifty little thing that's sort of like a little bug flying around the nineteenth century. And that's called the "th." It means "nineteenth" century. And that's how we abbreviate the enormity of what happened.

But here's a tip. If you say "nineteen hundreds" when you mean "nineteenth century," you're going to get in trouble with your dates. Because the nineteenth century is the eighteen hundreds. But! Don't say "the eighteen hundreds." People who say "the eighteen hundreds" are looked at in a special way by the people who say "the nineteenth century." The people who use eighteen hundreds don't know that. They don't know that the people who say "nineteenth century" are looking askance at them. So please consider not saying "eighteen hundreds," because the people who say "nineteenth century" will dismiss what you have to say. You can refer very knowingly to a specific decade of the nineteenth century- you can say, for instance, "the eighteen-eighties," or even, extra-knowingly, "the eighties"-but never "the eighteen hundreds."

So it's the nineteenth century we're talking about today. And on a timeline, it goes all the way from here-to here. Exactly one hundred years of pure poetry. And in that space of time, a lot happened. And after that time, in what is called the twentieth century, events became quite confused and nobody knew what they were doing. Rhyme went all to hell, and everything became a jumble.

And that's why we like to talk about the nineteenth century, because it's more fun, and everybody knows names like Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge-and Swinburne. And Tennyson. And Mr. Browning. And Mrs. Browning. And Arnold. And Emily Dickinson, of course. And Longfellow. And a bunch of other poets. The names just go on and on, because the nineteenth century was the century of English poetry. Coterminous with the flowering of the British empire was the flowering of the empire of English verse. And that is not what we will be talking about today.

Today we will just be talking about this moment right here. Right at the very end of the nineteenth century. The ends of centuries have a special meaning, as everybody who moves slowly toward them knows. Who was alive at the very end of the nineteenth cenury, at this last fleeting moment? Well, Swinburne was still alive. He was deaf, but he was still alive.

And there were some younger people chiming in. There were some people like Kipling. And Henley. And Patmore. And Alice Meynell. And Edmund Gosse. Gosse had met Tennyson and Swinburne, and he visited Walt Whitman before he died. He found Whitman sitting in an upstairs room in New Jersey. Clippings from various articles about himself were scattered on the floor. Every so often Whitman would fish up an article about himself and read a bit of it aloud.

So there was a lot going on there in the nineteenth century. And they lived their lives, and they wrote some poems, and then suddenly they bumped into the end of it. And they blasted through into 1901. That was the big moment, because then there they were in the twentieth century. When you're in the twentieth century, it's a whole different ball game. There are huge tropical plants dripping raw latex. There are giant pieces of diesel-powered earth-moving equipment. Turbines, huge hydroelectric projects. There's dynamite blowing up over there. There are exotic shores that are lapped at by alien warm pale-blue crinkled Saran Wrap sheets of ocean. There's neon, of course. Italy is a mess. Switzerland-who knows? France is a question mark. As is Austro-Hungary. It's all up for grabs! And who conquers the twentieth century? Who takes it from here on in and says, I've got it, folks? I'll take care of it, you don't have to worry about it now. Who takes care of it? I'll tell you who. The worst possible person, unfortunately. His name was Marinetti. The leader of the Futurists. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Manic Phil, who marinated the twentieth century in his influence. Marinetti was aggressive, he wanted to change things, and he wanted to break things. He wanted old buildings leveled. He wanted Venice blown up. He was a great writer of manifestos. Or manifesti.

And one morning in 1909, Marinetti's Futurist manifesto was published in Paris. The intellectuals opened the Figaro that morning, and there was this full page of authoritative promulgations. That said that the past was to be jettisoned. That Europe needed a new way of thinking. It was time to embrace steam and speed and power and war. The old ways were no good. Marinetti didn't use the word "fascism," but that's what it led to. Futurism led directly to Mussolini and Hitler. It also led to modern poetry. The two roads diverged, but not so much. There was in Marinetti's modernism a desire to stomp around heedlessly and a wish to sweep the counter clean. The ambitious guy poets really liked Marinetti.

And some of the girl poets liked the guy poets. Mina Loy, for example-that brilliant strange juxtaposer. She had her affair with Marinetti. As I've mentioned. And what happened then was that the gentleness, and the sharp eye, and the kind of lovely sexy anarchy of Mina Loy was conjoined with the machine-admiring bullying mechanistic destructiveness and manicness of Marinetti. And out of these two forces, Marinetti and Mina Loy, was begotten a young bully who talked loudly and sneered in public. His name was Ezra Pound. Sara Teasdale disliked Ezra Pound, and Ezra Pound disliked Sara Teasdale, so it was mutual.

And that's what I want to talk to you about. I want to clarify the sweep of it all. And the grandeur of it all. And the tragic waste of it all. The perversion of talents. The discouragement of gifts. The misapplication of energies. And even so, the flowering of some really nice poems along the way.

LITTLE INJURY TODAY, actually. I was carrying my computer downstairs in order to continue the cleanup of my office, which is progressing well, although slowly. I thought if I get my computer out of there-my big old computer, not my laptop-I'll be able to reach the next phase of cleaning. So I unhooked all the little machines that are connected to the big machine. I unhooked the power cord and the two external drives that I have, and the optical mouse with the little red eye in its belly, and the speakers, and the monitor, and the scanner, and the printer, and the keyboard, and I guess that's it. I looked at the USB cables dangling there, and I laughed pityingly at them, and I thought, Whoever designed the connector of the USB cable was a man who despised the human race, because you can't tell which way to turn it and you waste minutes of your tiny day, crouched, grunting, trying the half-blocked connector one way and the next.