Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Eberhart

Calling poetry an "energy resource" is Eberhart doing two things at once: flattering the nation and quietly rescuing art from the hobby shelf. In a country that loves measurable outputs - barrels, megawatts, GDP - he hijacks the language of industry and policy to make poetry sound like infrastructure. It is a savvy rhetorical move from a poet in a century obsessed with utility: if you can frame imagination as power, you can argue for it in the only dialect that reliably gets funded.

The line about "no energy crisis" carries Cold War-era undertones, when "resource security" was a political obsession and American strength was routinely described in terms of reserves and dominance. Eberhart answers that anxiety with a different kind of reserve: cultural endurance. Fossil fuels run out; the poetic impulse, he implies, renews itself with each generation because it is made from attention, language, and dissent - things a nation produces even when it is failing.

There's also a sly patriotism here. "Our country" is intimate and possessive, but the payoff is competitive: "equal to that of any country in the world". Poetry becomes soft power before the term went mainstream - a way to claim global stature without armies or oil fields. The subtext isn’t that poems replace politics; it’s that a nation without a living literature is strategically weaker, no matter how full its tanks are.