For all the innu­mer­able ways that the bank wipeout-cum-recession will make it dif­fi­cult for Obama to enact his policy pref­er­ences, I pre­dict that in one respect at least it will prove a boon. Obama’s budget calls for tax increases on the wealthy to begin in 2011:

Tax cuts enacted under Bush for fam­i­lies making more than $250,000 would be allowed to expire in 2011, increas­ing the top income tax rate from 35 per­cent to 39.6 per­cent. The top cap­i­tal gains tax rate would be increased from 15 per­cent to 20 percent.

Get­ting these tax increases through Con­gress will not be easy–already Repub­li­cans are promis­ing an all-​out fight–but had a Pres­i­dent Kerry tried this four years ago, it would have been polit­i­cally impossible.

I’ve long thought that the public sup­ported tax cuts not for the rea­sons that econ­o­mists sup­port tax cuts–that they free up pri­vate cap­i­tal for invest­ment–but because Ronald Reagan was suc­cess­ful in con­vinc­ing the coun­try that tax­a­tion was equiv­a­lent to gov­ern­ment theft.

I’m coming a few days late to this but wanted to note here, with much glad­ness, that Allen Gross­man won this year’s Bollin­gen Prize for Poetry. The prize pays $100,000 and has also been awarded to Wal­lace Stevens, Mar­i­anne Moore, W. H. Auden, E. E. Cum­mings, Louise Glück, Adri­enne Rich and Jay Wright.

As a poet and a critic, Gross­man is one of the great neglected resources in Amer­i­can poetry today, a fact that, as a friend put it at dinner tonight, prob­a­bly owes more to his inim­itabil­ity than any­thing else. (You can try to ape Ash­bery; no one apes Gross­man.) In his essay on great­ness last Sunday, David Orr wrote that

the per­sona we asso­ciate with great­ness is some­thing, you know, exceptional—an aris­to­crat, a rebel, a states­man, an apos­tate, a mad-​eyed genius who has drunk from the Foun­tain of Truth and tasted the Fruit of Knowl­edge and donned the Beret of. . . . Well, anyway, it’s some­body who takes him­self very seri­ously and demands that we do so as well. Great­ness implies scale, and a great poet is a big sen­si­bil­ity writ­ing about big things in a big way.

I don’t agree with that, quite, but if I did I’d need look no fur­ther than Gross­man for some­one who fits that bill to a T. (As Joshua noted here, Grossman’s essay on Hart Crane in Chicago Review 52:2/3 bears on the ques­tion of great­ness, and in much more con­vinc­ing terms than Orr’s.) Here’s hoping that the Bollin­gen will open some eyes.

For more on Grossman’s prize, see the notice at Yale and at the U. of Chicago Press. I’ve copied in three poems from his latest book, Descartes’ Lone­li­ness, after the jump.

It was only a matter of time. From Wired:

Elec­tronic Arts’ upcom­ing game Dante’s Inferno is a riff on God of War that stars a beefed-​up war­rior based on the author of The Divine Comedy. Seriously.

For those of us who spent our for­ma­tive years sleep­ing through Clas­sics lec­tures, Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century epic poem The Divine Comedy is largely a mys­tery — 14,000 lines of alle­gory chron­i­cling the author’s philo­soph­i­cal jour­ney through hell, Pur­ga­tory and beyond. Elec­tronic Arts hopes to jog our col­lec­tive mem­o­ries a bit with Dante’s Inferno, an action game adapted from the first sec­tion of the Comedy.

This con­tem­po­rary take on the author’s trip through the nine cir­cles of hell fol­lows the gen­eral frame­work of the orig­i­nal piece, with artis­tic lib­er­ties taken to con­vert demure prose into a fast-​paced action-​adventure title for PlaySta­tion 3 and Xbox 360.

Uh-​hem. Demure? Prose?

From We’re Going To Need More Leeches: