POLITICS, like tragedy, has no meaning without judgment. This is probably why Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth is not easily forgotten, not even by a president.

At a poetry evening held one evening at the White House, as Stephen Greenblatt relates in The New York Review of Books (12 April 2007), President Clinton said that his first introduction to poetry was at junior high school, when his teacher asked him to memorize lines from a soliloquy in