“I've been accused of humanizing the Nazis, to which I can only say, you can't blame me for that. God did that. Go talk to him. It's a strange thing for an atheist to say.”

Up the reputable walks of old established trees
They stalk, children of the nouveaux riches; chimes
Of the tall Clock Tower drench their heads in blessing

Stone lips to the unspoken cave;
Fingering the nervous strings, alone,
I crossed that grey sill, raised my head

From “Dabbling in Corruption,” an essay by W. D. Snodgrass, in our Spring 1994 issue. Snodgrass was born on this day in 1926; he died in 2009. Here, he recalls seeing Robert Frost read at a Washington D.C. poetry conference in October 1962, when …

I don’t know what had roused cummings’s ire; he was fairly well represented in Untermeyer’s anthologies.