Mr Cogito
Herbert's "Mr Cogito," a mild, ironic intellectual who has survived totalitarianism and is trying to figure out how to live with dignity, is one of the great recurring characters in world poetry. The "Envoy of Mr Cogito" ends with an instruction to survive with one's honor intact even when everything is lost. Herbert is the poet of moral resistance without sentimentality; his influence on American poets like Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky has been enormous.
Herbert's dry, unpunctuated irony travels into English unevenly, and the translations have been publicly fought over. Within the volume the method never varies: Mr Cogito considers his legs, the newspaper, pure thought, always at the same ironic distance, and the flatness accumulates. The closing 'Envoy' towers over everything before it, which is partly an indictment of everything before it.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
