“In a recent interview, Heaney said he was often asked what the value of poetry was during times of economic recession. The answer, he explained, is that it is at just such moments of crisis that people realize that they do not live by economics alone. ‘If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness,’ Heaney said.” And if we did fortify our inner lives? “What a turn that would be,” Tim Rutten writes, “a process that would involve periods of silence and moments when we turn things off.”