Interesting article by John Sisk:
That splendid poet Wallace Stevens had too much irony to harken to such enthralled simplifiers. Yet after World War II, when the times were clamorous with competing world-savers, he would sometimes wonder if he was sufficiently moved by the big, far-reaching issues. As his biographer Joan Richardson tells us, he once admitted in a letter to a friend that "I am, after all, more moved by the first sounds of the birds on my own street than by the death of a thousand penguins in Antarctica." This was a way of saying that charity begins at home-a heretical position for professional world-savers, who in the interest of the distant penguins will gladly sacrifice anyone's local birds, even at the risk of losing the penguins as well. Stevens' casual remark helps us see how crucial can be the difference between mere world-preservers and virtue-hounded world-savers.
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