| Summary/Abstract |
THERE ARE times—and the present moment is very much one of them—when certain great poems, minatory and ominous, force their way into the mind. It might be Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians,” or Auden’s “The Fall of Rome,” not to mention Kipling’s “Recessional” and “The White Man’s Burden.” Published in 1898, the latter’s subtitle, more interesting than its lurid title, is “The United States and The Philippine Islands,” but might just as well be “The United States and the Middle East” more than a century later, with its warning about “The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard.”
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