Poem of the Week--#1

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pool singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;


Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;


And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.


Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;


And Spring herself when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Sara Teasdale 1920

Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, was a science fiction writer who produced his most famous works in the 1950s.  What makes him most significant was his ability to predict the effect that (as yet uninvented) modern technology would have on human society.  

As Tim Kreider says in an opinion editorial for The New York Times called "Uncle Ray's Dystopia," Bradbury saw that modern communications technology would come with a price of its own:  "Mr. Bradbury didn’t just extrapolate the evolution of gadgetry; he foresaw how it would stunt and deform our psyches."