The idea, Hart said, was that understanding “‘the life and philosophy of the poet illuminates the poetry,” which “readings by some of our finest actors then ignite.” In a video introduction, Hart contends that poetry is “the highest form of language, without a doubt.”

Words That Burn features 15 poets, and many more pairings: Dominic West reads Percy Shelley and Robert Lowell; Juliet Stevenson reads Emily Dickinson; Ralph Fiennes reads W.H. Auden. Harriet Walter reads Sylvia Plath; Charles Dance reads Elizabeth Bishop; Elizabeth McGovern reads Lowell and Marianne Moore; and so on. And the app is free, created by the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation in her memory.

Alongside each recording, the text of the poem appears. Occasionally, while reciting, an actor will add or modify a word, changing the meaning of the text slightly, causing the listener to reflect on the difference between the original and what has been spoken. Some read quickly and brusquely, others languorously.

Dominic West inserts an extra “I” in Lowell’s “Man and Wife.” Harold Pinter is all force delivering Philip Larkin’s “Vers de Sociéte.”

Outside the simple poetry layouts, the graphics are both wonderful and ridiculous. The main navigation screen, presented as a library, features a crackling fire, mounted animal head, and ornate gold portrait frames filled with an overlarge italicized font.

The aesthetic of this room powerfully calls to mind a strange sugar plantation whodunit game that I played in the early ’90s. Other aspects of the design are more evocative of New Yorker caricatures or Monty Python.

Getting around can be tricky. Move a balloon to the center of the screen and click just once on it to select a poem. Make sure not to confuse the app into thinking you want to read the poet’s or actor’s bio yet again. I would provide more guidance here, but I don’t want to mislead you. I still get lost, myself.

Juliet Stevenson’s rendition of “I Heard a Fly Buzz — When I Died—” is particularly lovely — slow and melodious, with pauses where I didn’t expect them, underscoring the gravity of Dickinson’s verse in a whole new way.

Hart herself, as the critic Emma Garman has said, “believed in three major destructive powers: erotic obsession, grief and envy. In her six novels, she anatomized each with an unflinching boldness that was, and remains, unparalleled.” The poetry showcased here tends to reflect those and other dark preoccupations.

Especially in a country with so much Jewish blood on its hands, this is – or was – a question that no Good German should ask in public. It was even more verboten when asked by someone who had belatedly admitted that as a teenager he had served, however briefly, in the Nazi paramilitary unit, the Waffen SS. But the 84-year-old Grass dared to break the taboo. He spoke out and said “What Must Be Said.”

Yet why do I hesitate to name
that other land in which
for years—although kept secret—
a growing nuclear power has existed
beyond supervision or verification,
subject to no inspection of any kind?

Predicting he would be branded an anti-Semite, as he has been in full measure, Grass named Israel and called its atomic power a threat to “an already fragile world peace.” Nor did he stop there. He berated his own country for complicity by selling the Israelis “yet another submarine equipped to transport nuclear warheads.”

Germany had already given Israel two Dolphin-class submarines, and subsidized one-third of the $540 million cost of another. The Germans are planning to similarly subsidize the sale of the latest submarine.

Nuclear arms and submarines are enough to drag down any poem, and “What Must Be Said” lacks elegance and grace, at least in the English translation by Breon Mitchell. But as a poet, Grass risks even more in suggesting a political solution. Our leaders should renounce the use of force, he writes, directly countering Obama’s insistence on keeping a military option on the table. And they should “insist that the governments of both Iran and Israel allow an international authority free and open inspection of the nuclear potential and capability of both.”

No other course offers help
to Israelis and Palestinians alike,
to all those living side by side in enmity
in this region occupied by illusions,
and ultimately, to all of us.

Will any significant world leader take up the challenge and publicly support such an even-handed and common-sense approach? Not if the Israeli government of Bibi Netanyahu and his defenders in Europe and the United States have their way. Their purpose in reviling Grass as a Nazi and anti-Semite is precisely to silence anyone who might even consider following his lead.

Odds are that their campaign of vilification will succeed, at least in the short term. But they may be overplaying their hand. In Germany, most of the great and good came down against Grass and his breaking of the old taboo against attacking Israel. But once Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai banned Grass from entering the country, German politicians of all stripes have criticized Israel for its “absurd overreaction.” Even more encouraging, few leaders in the rest of Europe have picked up the cudgels against Grass, while several prominent Israelis have publicly rejected any suggestion that he is an anti-Semite.

One might see in all this evidence that growing numbers of people, Jews as well as non-Jews, are growing sick and tired of the old smear. Europe, the United States and several Muslim countries have enough instances of real Jew-hating that crying wolf just to stifle debate has become reckless and counterproductive. One might also see in the current furor signs that both Israel and Germany are becoming “normal countries,” though Grass would be the first to insist that he and his fellow Germans are “tarnished by a stain that can never be removed.”

But, “What Must Be Said” has little time to act as a brake on a dangerous military catastrophe, as Grass still hopes it will. For all the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts through Turkey and others, the Israeli-American war on Iran kicked off covertly years ago with the training of dissident Mujahideen-e-Khalq terrorists and their targeted killings of Iranian scientists and engineers, as well as with the Struxnet cyberattacks on the Iranian centrifuges. Open war appears almost certain follow, and the only thing likely to stop it would be for hundreds of thousands of voices to call on world leaders to heed Grass’ warning.

For Larkin, the truly poetic subjects were the passage of time and the inevitability of death. Almost all of his great poems deal with mortality, under a variety of disguises. The last poem in his first collection, “At Grass,” considers retired racehorses in a pasture: “Do memories plague their ears like flies?/They shake their heads. Dusk brims the shadows./Summer by summer all stole away,/The starting gates, the crowds and cries….” “The Explosion,” the last poem in his last book, concludes with the widows of miners killed in an accident, imagining their heavenly reunions with their husbands:

                        for a second

Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed–

Gold as on a coin, or walking

Somehow from the sun towards them…

In between come poems like “The Old Fools,” a bitter depiction of senility; and “The Building,” about a hospital where “All know they are going to die./Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end”; and “Church Going,” where an old cathedral’s only remaining power comes from the dead buried around it. Larkin’s summing-up on the subject of death comes in one of the few poems he wrote in his last years, “Aubade”:

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

–The good not done, the love not given, time

Torn off unused–nor wretchedly because

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This poem appeared in a magazine after Larkin’s last collection was published, and had to wait for book publication until the “Collected Poems” of 1988. That volume, edited by Larkin’s friend and fellow poet Anthony Thwaite, included a dozen or so excellent poems that were either uncollected or unpublished by Larkin. Less happily, it broke up the sequence of the poet’s own collections in order to present all his work in chronological order, which meant mixing up masterpieces with squibs. Aware of the problem, Thwaite produced a second “Collected Poems” in 2003, which restored the integrity of the original three books. It also included the poems of “The North Ship,” Larkin’s very first collection, which he published in his early 20s and considered juvenilia.

Already you can see the accumulative process at work, as Larkin’s small, nearly perfect body of work is churned and re-churned. But this was only the beginning. The publication of his wonderful “Selected Letters,” in 1992, was a welcome addition to the canon. Then came separate books of his correspondence with Kingsley Amis, his best friend, and Monica Jones, the closest he came to a lifelong romantic partner. In 2002 came a collection of fugitive essays, “Further Requirements”; in 2005 a collection of truly minor “Juvenilia.” Even a few quasi-pornographic stories set in a girls’ school, written as a diversion, appeared between hard covers as “Trouble in Willow Gables.”

Now comes the “Complete Poems,” a brick of a book in which the flowers of Larkin’s work lie pressed. The volume, edited with great industry and accuracy by Archie Burnett, is 729 pages long; of these, Larkin’s three major collections occupy exactly 68. Throw in the other finished poems of his mature period, and you might reach 100 pages of genuinely good poems. This category includes both published works like “Aubade” and poems that Larkin presumably judged unworthy of publication, but that certainly deserve to be read, such as “Best Society”:

Viciously, then, I lock my door.

The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside

Ushers in evening rain. Once more

Uncontradicting solitude

Supports me on its giant palm;

And like a sea-anemone

Or simple snail, there cautiously

Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

The other 629 pages will have little or no interest for the general reader, but they are a monument to the word “complete.” Burnett has assembled everything in the Collected Poems and the Juvenilia, plus verse extracts from Larkin’s letters, plus scraps from the workbooks. As near as possible, anything that flowed from Larkin’s pen in meter and rhyme is between these covers. Whether all of it deserves the name of “poems” is another matter. Take this quatrain:

And did you once see Russell plain?

And did he start at Condon’s nod,

Ten choruses of “Da-da Strain”?

            You lucky fucking sod!

Readers of Larkin’s letters will probably guess that this profane squib about jazz musicians was originally written to Amis. Burnett’s note confirms this, and identifies the clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, and explains that Larkin is imitating a famous poem by Browning (“Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?”). The only way Burnett’s commentary could be improved, in fact, is if it were cross-referenced to the text by page number; as it is, finding the commentary to any particular poem is a laborious process. But the disproportion between the importance of the text and the amount of work that went into its annotation is striking, and a little comical. The “Complete Poems” gives the sense of having filed away Larkin’s oeuvre for good in some Platonic archive; it is ill suited for any reader who wants to encounter his poems as living works of art.

As the 1960s continued Rich grew more doubtful about traditions — of family life, of political belief, of literary form — and more confident that her poetry could unsettle them: Like many of her peers she reacted against war in Vietnam and racial injustice at home, and more than any of those peers she found ways of writing poetry that sounded as troubled as her country felt. She also found new forms, Americanizing the ghazal, for example, and inventing the prose poem as terse teleplay, as in “Shooting Script,” from “The Will to Change” (1970),  a set of directions to herself: “To pull yourself up by your own roots; to eat the last meal in your old neighborhood.”

Rich found new neighbors, and new directions, in the feminist movement, which recognized her as a leader, in her poems of the late 1960s and 1970s, first tormented and fierce, and then clear and confident. “Diving Into the Wreck” (1973), which won the National Book Award, remains her most famous single book, the one by which many readers discover her as a writer for whom the political had to be personal.  ”The Dream of a Common Language” (1978) made available some of the first and still some of the most admired American verse about erotic love between women, in the sequence “Twenty-One Love Poems.”  The same book contained her talismanic poem about Marie Curie, who “died denying/ her wounds came from the same source as her power.”

Rich would never deny it. Her work of those years established her as a controversial figure, attracting polemics both for and against it; it also attracted the many readers who saw her not just as a thoughtful, inventive writer but also as a beacon for political change. Those readers would stay with her to this day.

By the end of the 1970s Rich had established herself as a literary and cultural critic too, introducing Emily Dickinson (“Vesuvius at Home”) and Elizabeth Bishop (“The Eye of the Outsider”) as poets whose perspectives challenged patriarchy, and introducing (in “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” for example) foundations for lesbian and queer cultural criticism. Her first and longest prose book, “Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution” (1976), defended mothers by taking apart, with perhaps unprecedented honesty, our culture’s assumptions about them; the meaning of motherhood, like the meaning of womanhood, of citizenship, of activism, of literature, could be changed, and Rich had the will to change it.

She herself, and her poems, continued to change. “Your Native Land, Your Life” (1984), “An Atlas of the Difficult World” (1991) and subsequent books introduced Rich to the retrospective sequence, the poem of family (hence of  Jewish, and of Southern) heritage, and to the sequence based on geography: “I fix on the land. I am stuck to earth,” she wrote, introducing “a map of our country,” with its “battlefield/ from a nineteenth century war,” its “sea-town of myth and story when the fishing fleets/ went bankrupt.” Rich became a poet of California, where she settled with her partner Michelle Cliff; she remained a poet of feminism, and of the struggle for lesbian, gay and queer rights, but also a poet alert to other injustice, environmental and economic, a poet who insisted that her own left politics had to proceed as an alert, untidy, unfinished and international coalition: No cause stood alone.

Neither would Rich stand alone. “In Dark Fields of the Republic” (1995) “we were trying to live a personal life … But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged/ into our personal weather.” And in “Fox” (2001) Rich looked back on her earlier life as a poet of well-made poems, a poet of the American establishment, considering what she had learned, what she had rejected, what she still owed, from her long quiet apprenticeship: “a soul can be partitioned like a country,” she wrote; “loyalties crumbling send up sparks and smoke.”

Rich the poet who remained true to her own mixed feelings was also a poet unafraid to offer moral instruction, to proffer judgments; the poet so strongly identified with causes was also a poet who kept interrupting herself in her poems, breaking apart and questioning her own rough forms. “The School Among the Ruins” (2004) memorialized both her commitments and her self-doubt, asking what use both would have in an America (or a “USonia,” as she called it) reshaped and deformed by 9/11.

Perhaps no American poet has had at once so large and loyal an audience, and such an influence on that audience, on what her readers wrote and what they chose to do with their lives.  The number and variety of tributes to Rich already present on the Internet, by professional writers and critics, by career activists, and by many other fans, testify to  Rich’s importance for a wide range of American readers. She will be remembered for the proprieties of her earliest work, and for the wild inquiries of the latest; for her California coast, her Cambridge, her New York City, her Baltimore; for her responses to American history, to “North American Time,” and for her returns to the European thought of Mary Wollstonecraft, of Brecht and Marx; for her long declamatory lines and her harsh, short ones; for her poems modeled on biography, on archaeology, on film, on diaries, on explorers’ journals, on maps, on the long history of older short poems; for her polemics, which did change public life, and for her quarrels with herself.

“What would have happened,” asked one banner, “if Emily Dickinson had been prescribed Prozac?” Idle speculation aside — one pictures long, glazed-over afternoons spent knitting frocks in New England — the protesters were implying that Prozac stymies creativity, and that the Poetry Foundation, lavishly funded by a pharmaceutical fortune, does business with the kind of people who might, given the chance, have put Dickinson on antidepressants.

The story of how a nonprofit literary foundation became a stage for anti-Prozac agitation begins in 2003. That year, Ruth Lilly, the heiress of the pharmaceutical family, gave a fairy-godmotherish gift of $200 million to the Poetry Foundation. In the cash-poor world of poetry, it was like dropping a quivering church mouse into a gourmet cheese emporium. Since then, the foundation has built a sleek new headquarters in Chicago’s West Loop, which boasts a gorgeous library, a public garden, an auditorium and the offices of Poetry, the foundation’s storied magazine.

To the CPC, the foundation has also settled comfortably into its new role as an oppressor of the masses: a monied bastion of “state-corporate control,” according to their leaflets. They believe the foundation now wields the anti-creative influence of its financial overlords.

As the Occupy movement nears its third month, the CPC — though not strictly an Occupy offshoot — is among the many groups decrying arts institutions as clubhouses of the 1 percent. In October, New York protesters occupied Sotheby’s, MoMA and the Artists Space gallery in SoHo. “We, the artists of the 99% have emerged!” one protester wrote. “Not as pawns in your fraudulent art market where the royalty of Wall Street rule.”

If anything links these protests with the movement, it’s not a particular agenda, any more than Zuccotti Park’s graduate student tenants share the economic philosophy of its hobos. Rather, it’s a general cynicism about large institutions that has spilled from politics into culture.

One upside to these protests is that they promote a conversation about financial regulation, income inequality and the conditions of our democracy. Another is that we can now read about the many weird guerrilla antics that the Occupy movement has inspired in groups across the country. The CPC is just such a group, and its members have an intriguing mix of qualities: they’re friendly, intelligent, brazen, pretentious, earnest, nutty and sometimes drunk.

The CPC headquarters is a warehouse somewhere in Chicago, and it’s considerably less swank than that of the Poetry Foundation. “We have been living in a construction zone for the past three months,” says cell member Brooks Johnson. “We have a lending library here, someone is always playing music. We all sleep in the same room (the library) in a pile of unwashed blankets, couches, arms, legs. Sometimes it becomes difficult to figure out where you end and someone else begins.”

The night before the Poetry Foundation reading, the group opened a bottle of whiskey and composed their manifesto. Because Ruth Lilly’s fortune came from the manufacturer of Prozac — Eli Lilly & Co. — it follows, they argued, that the foundation has been tainted by anti-poetic drug money. Indeed, the opulence of the new building reflects the kind of corporate materialism they feel has stifled poetry all across America. Swank décor, they argue, does nothing for poetry. Rather, “poetry happens when we are shaken out of our psychic, linguistic, phenomenological, and indeed even physiological compliance with the spectacle and its myriad illusory modes of reification.”

In breezy, congenial emails to Salon — lightly peppered with typos and ampersands — the CPC elaborated on its ideology, alternating between clear wording and strange abstractions. Asked to explain what the leaflet meant by  “the spectacle and its myriad illusory modes of reification,” Johnson answered that cultural institutions “are an integral part of the Spectacle. They are the conduits through which images, objects and language ‘transform’ into high art.”

It’s a Situationist take, in short. Situationism is the view that we’re deeply influenced by the rooms we enter — at its extreme, it holds that we’re the hand puppets of architecture. A famous example of this phenomenon is the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, in which college students inhabiting a mock-prison gradually began to act like actual prisoners and guards, the former rebellious and the latter ruthless. Rather than turning students into jailhouse brutes, the Poetry Foundation headquarters turns its visitors into a flock of docile bourgeois spectators, as the CPC sees it; the trouble is that such spaces constitute “a sort of tabernacle, a sacred space wherein the desire is to be wowed or whatever by the art which a given cultural institution has deemed worthy of praise.” The CPC prefers a more egalitarian setting for art — they demand that the foundation fund the construction of two new buildings in lower-income areas of Chicago. They also promote “disrupting or queering the normally passive experience” that people have at poetry readings, museums and other art events.

The reading the CPC “queered” with the Dickinson banner was that of their hero Raúl Zurita, a Chilean poet who became prominent after speaking out against Augusto Pinochet’s military coup in 1973. Though tortured by Pinochet’s thugs, Zurita survived to become a leading member of CADA, the Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (Art Actions Collective). His protests against the Pinochet regime in the 1980s included skywriting his poetry over New York City and splashing ammonia on his own face, which nearly blinded him. While the CPC doesn’t claim to have Zurita’s heroism (or to share his taste for ammonia), its members are inspired by his example. Their second banner that night bore the slogan “Viva CADA!” and Zurita seems to have appreciated the gesture: the Chilean newspaper La Tercera quotes him speaking with tenderness about his new fans. In this light, the CPC is startlingly reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño’s novel “The Savage Detectives,” in which a group of ardent young Mexican writers dub themselves “visceral realists,” seek out an obscure poet they idolize, and band together against the “establishment” — bursting, for instance, into a poetry workshop they wish to disrupt and later challenging a literary critic to a sword fight.

The Zurita protest may be found on YouTube, and the footage offers its share of pleasures, if only because of the sheer awkwardness involved. In another clip, shot during the wine-and-cheese reception after the reading, the protesters quibble over the legal semantics of “trespassing” with some very uncomfortable-looking ushers, who try to bar the exit until the police arrive. Despite the blockade, the two banner-hangers somehow managed to slip out in time to avoid arrest. The foundation has since hired actual security guards — more money, more problems. (Poetry Foundation officials declined to discuss the CPC or its protests.)

The CPC’s leaflets also protest the arrest of Stephanie Dunn, a 24-year-old who, at a foundation event a few weeks earlier, had staged an impromptu protest. At first she only threw a cup of free wine to the floor, but after foundation employees objected, she partially undressed and started an enthusiastic make-out session with Johnson, rolled around on the floor, and at some point stole a bottle of wine. When I asked Dunn why she was arrested, she answered, “For having too much fun.”

Dunn is not a member of the CPC, but she is their friend (apparently with benefits), and she clearly shares much of their outlook. “The night Steph and I met,” Johnson writes, “she tagged the wall of a bougie art gallery … a group of about 40 of us were on our way to occupy the Federal Reserve when Steph was arrested for sitting atop the Haymarket statue while playing a banjo. Some of us in the group have been participating in the occupation here in Chicago in fact we met one member of our group the first day that Occupy Chi[cago] began.”

As for the bottle she stole, Dunn cheerfully invoked her “Right to Wine.” But the CPC had a more interesting comment: “Look, we are thieves … and ones with a pretty strict code of ethics; namely, that we don’t steal from people…. Stealing from corporate entities, or banks, or the gods, or whatever has a long and venerable tradition. It’s how we got fire, how Hermes became a God, how so much great myth, art, & literature has been conceived — acts of thievery and transgression, which restore a certain sort of balance.”

If they have a God, it’s clearly not Hermes but Loki, the Norse trickster, and they’re glad to see the faith is spreading. “It’s deeply encouraging to see others taking up the mantle of institutional critique,” say the CPC. “We feel like we are a small ripple in this much greater context of whats [sic] happening globally.” As for the Occupy Museums crowd, Dunn remarks, “I hope they’re having a blast! I have a thing for kissing statues and licking paintings, but unfortunately, due to my court-ordered supervision, I cannot participate as visibly or intensely because if I get arrested I will go to jail for a while.”

Odd as the CPC’s agenda may be, it does reflect a common (and romantic) notion that wealth is at odds with artistic authenticity. Nor is it new to fume that poets in particular grow dull amid the trappings of capitalism. In a recent Vanity Fair article on the photographer Milton Gendel, James Reginato tells the following anecdote. Sometime in the 1940s, two American editors at the French Surrealist magazine VVV gave their boss, André Breton, engraved Christmas cards. Breton had them fired immediately. “These snakes at my bosom!” he screamed. “I have fought the middle-class bourgeoisie all my life. And now they bring me Christmas cards!”

Moreover, shenanigans have always had a place in the art world, and they can sometimes needle us into taking a fresh look at things. Sure, one can find plenty to admire in issues of Poetry and in the programs of the Poetry Foundation (in full disclosure, I’ve written articles for them), but one may well ask whether the foundation could do a bit more for the lower classes in Chicago, or whether its wealth now distracts from its mission. It’s also worth considering the CPC’s observation that “the language that [foundation president] John Barr uses in talking about the Poetry Foundation … is eerily reminiscent of the corporate language of marketing and branding.” For them, the fact that Barr used to be an investment banker on Wall Street says it all.

At the same time, these protests reflect an unwitting hypocrisy: The group claims to fight for the common people but in fact has put its own priorities above those of people who attend poetry events. There’s irony in a protest that seeks to defend poetry by disrupting poetry readings. Those who would rather not have their evening “queered” are simply too bourgeois, it seems, to count. In much the same way, one wonders why Ms. Dunn claims to defend art by licking paintings. Between that kind of activism and any form of accountability one finds a buffer of obtuse pseudo-theory, a convenient layer of cerebral anarchy.

“Croatoan,” as American history buffs know, was carved mysteriously on a post in Roanoke Island, N.C., — the last trace of a colony that disappeared sometime in the late 1580s. Its governor returned after three years away to find the fort deserted, and the colony was never found. If today’s Croatoans — like some of the Occupy Museums protesters — don’t find a better tack, they will prove more aptly named than they realize. Like their namesake, they will disappear into a footnote.