From the title essay:
"Two epidemic illnesses of our time - upon both of which virtual industries of cures have been founded - are the disintegration of communities and the disintegration of persons. That these two are related (that private loneliness, for instance, will necessarily accompany public confusion) is clear enough. And I take for granted that most people have explored in themselves and their surroundings some of the intricacies of the practical causes and effects; most of us, for example, have understood that the results are usually bad when people act in social or moral isolation, and also when, because of such isolation, they fail to act.
What seems not so well understood, because not so much examined, is the relation between these disintegrations and the disintegration of language. My impression is that we have seen, for perhaps a hundred and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. And I believe that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities."
Other essays in this volume: The Specialization of Poetry; People, Land and Community; Notes: Unspecializing Poetry; Poetry and Marriage; and Poetry and Place. Good stuff.
On the cover is a Chinese character depicting "a man beside the sign for 'word.' It is the written form of xin, which Ezra Pound defined as: 'Fidelity to the given word. The man here standing by his word.' Such fidelity to the word, as evidenced by clarity of meaning and intent, would go far to reconnect language to life."
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