Truly as Keats or Wordsworth in a rhyme

Caught the essential color and the sound

Of all they sought in life, and all they found,

So I shall have the world as in my time.

For Wordsworth's flower and John Keats' nightingale,

And what the west wind made poor Shelley feel,

I'll put a brutal beautiful bridge of steel,

And the headlong city from a steamer's rail.

Pan on the fifty-seventh floor at blazing noon

Pipes while the angled shadows melt and change

In patterns geometrical and strange,

But there are men who recognize the tune.

And there are men whose hearts leap up to see

The soaring thrust of a tower tipped with gold;

There are poets still, but now their words are bold,

Naked and swift as new machinery.

Once it was right to be stern, or gently sad.

I'll rip the lines of my poems out direct,

With a linotype or rivet-machine effect,

Sudden and cruel and a little mad.