The interest in poetry in the wake of the calamitous attacks of last fall surprised some observers. But the art of poetry makes the breath of any one reader its medium: a commanding appeal, heightened at a time when many of us felt overdosed or overwhelmed by mass media.

Mass media, mass scale—and the scale of the disaster itself, the size of the buildings in New York and Washington, the number dead, the size of the airplanes, all conveyed and somehow multiplied by the tremendous reach and vividness of the medium of television, the immediate irrevocability called up by the medium of still photography. We have a significant thirst for individual scale. Great poems and mediocre ones, by the singular nature of the art, share that quality of personal scale with teddy bears and photographs pinned to the chain-link fence surrounding a disaster site. Great poems and mediocre ones have been invoked, aptly and inaptly, in response to this particular calamity.

More often than not, the best poems about an event are written long before it happens. Last Sept. 21, I presented in Slate some poems of that kind. I thought they anticipated, in indelible form, things that many were saying or feeling. For instance, the commonplace observation that life had been transformed, a sense of permanent anxieties making remote what had been normal. We see this in Mark Strand's translation of a poem written decades before our catastrophe of last year, by the Brazilian Carlos Drummond de Andrade:

         Souvenir of the Ancient World

Clara strolled in the garden with the children.
The sky was green over the grass,
the water was golden under the bridges,
other elements were blue and rose and orange,
a policeman smiled, bicycles passed,
a girl stepped onto the lawn to catch a bird,
the whole world—Germany, China—
             All was quiet around Clara.

The children looked at the sky: it was not forbidden.
Mouth, nose, eyes were open. There was no danger.
What Clara feared were the flu, the heat, the insects.
Clara feared missing the eleven o'clock trolley,
waiting for letters slow to arrive,
not always being able to wear a new dress. But
           she strolled in the garden, in the morning!

They had gardens, they had mornings in those days!

The abrupt pivoting of this poem on the innocent little fulcrum "But" so near the ending imitates the sudden leverage of calamity that can make the living feel suddenly transmogrified into the ancients.

Drummond de Andrade's poem is a distinguished version of the commonplace that life is fragile, subject to instant, irrevocable change. A different, perhaps opposite commonplace—the observation that mutability is an absolute, with nothing to be done or said about it—attains memorable form in an even older poem that I presented in Slate last September, Edwin Arlington Robinson's "The House on the Hill":

They are all gone away,
The house is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say

Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill;
They are all gone away.

Nor is there one today
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.

Why is it then we stray
Around that shrunken sill?
They are all gone away.

And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.

There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,

There is nothing more to say.

The stoic reticence of these lines, like the sneaky pathos of Drummond de Andrade's, has the penetration of historical momentum: Precisely that they are not occasional, not a response to a specific moment, gives them historical urgency.

An error implicit in the past year's talk about poetry and Sept. 11 is the notion that great historical events inspire great works of art. Yeats' "Easter 1916" and Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" make exceptions of the Easter Rebellion and the death of Abraham Lincoln. The World War I poetry of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg is pitched against the very notion of great events, passionately tilted toward the horrible experience of mechanized war as individual, personal experience.

I mean no disrespect toward anyone who has written about the terrorist crime or our response to it. (I have written a poem about the event, to be published the week of the anniversary by the Washington Post magazine section.) But some historical perspective is appropriate. Within a year of John F. Kennedy's assassination, Basic Books published an anthology of poems responding to his death and presidency. The list of contributors is impressive, but so far as I know none of the poems is much read today. Some of them are embarrassing.