BILL MOYERS: If the creators of comedy like Duck Soup and the headlines of The Onion sometimes come closer to the truth than the rest of us mortals can, so, too, the poet, whose imagination and gift for metaphor try to make rhyme or reason of it all. No one I've encountered over the past year understands the power of poetry and the infinite gift of the spoken word quite as much as the man you're about to meet.

Walking down the street with this gentleman is a little bit like taking a stroll with the man of a thousand faces. Like all great character actors, my neighbor John Lithgow has the genes of a chameleon in his DNA.

Just who is this man, anyway?

[JOHN LITHGOW as ROBERTA MULDOON]: My name is Roberta.

BILL MOYERS: Roberta Muldoon, for one - football player turned transsexual in The World According To Garp. He's also Dr. Emilio Lizardo in the cult classic Buckaroo Banzai. A gentle Iowa banker in love with Debra Winger in Terms Of Endearment.

[JOHN LITHGOW as SAM BURNS]: It's always so nice to see you, I can hardly believe it.

BILL MOYERS: Name your villain, and odds are Lithgow's your man. He's a psychopath in Blow Out.

[JOHN LITHGOW as ERIC QUALEN]: Kill a few people they call you a murderer.

BILL MOYERS: A killer in Cliffhanger.

[JOHN LITHGOW as ERIC QUALEN]: Kill a million and you're a conqueror.

[CHILD]: You're a monster.

[JOHN LITHGOW as ERIC QUALEN]: I'm not a monster.

BILL MOYERS: And the evil prince in Shrek

[JOHN LITHGOW as LORD FARQUAAD]: You and the rest of that fairy trash poisoning my perfect world.

BILL MOYERS: If you're among the millions who went nuts for the hit TV series 3rd Rock From The Sun, you'll remember him as Dr. Dick Solomon, the lunatic leader of aliens come to study Earth.

[JOHN LITHGOW as DICK SOLOMON]: I come from a different world.

[JANE CURTIN as MARY ALBRIGHT]: And that's news?

BILL MOYERS: Lithgow comes by his role-playing naturally. At age six he was on stage with his father's theatre company in Ohio. He would go on through the years to win two Tony Awards on Broadway in roles as diverse as those in his movies and television.

A British rugby player in The Changing Room. An aging, punch-drunk prizefighter in Requiem for a Heavyweight.

A French diplomat madly in love with a Chinese opera diva - who's really a man - in M. Butterfly.

He's even played himself, just last year, in a one-man show called Stories by Heart - a production at Lincoln Center that was a tribute to his book-loving poetry-quoting parents and grandmother.

Beyond stage and screen Lithgow keeps busy with the word. He's written several best-selling children's books, including his most recent, I Got Two Dogs.

But it's this book, The Poets' Corner, a kind of chapbook of Lithgow's favorite poetry, that may best express his love of language and his zeal for sharing it with young and old, alike loving what the poet Marianne Moore called, "The pull of the sentence."

John Lithgow's appearing now in a timely revival of Arthur Miller's classic play, All My Sons. Although written 61 years ago, it seems to have jumped off the pages of today's newspapers.

Lithgow plays Joe Keller, a loving family man with a terrible secret. During the Second World War, he cravenly cut corners for profit at his manufacturing plant, shipping damaged parts to the military and causing the deaths of 21 pilots. He lets his partner take the rap and go to jail and keeps it secret from the family. The truth is revealed in the play's climactic confrontation between the father and the son who worshipped him.

[JOHN LITHGOW as JOE KELLER]: What could I do?! I'm in business. A man is in business. A hundred and twenty cracked, you are out of business. You got a process, the process don't work, you are out of business. You don't know how to operate, your stuff is no good. They close you up. They tear up your contracts. What the hell is it to them?! You lay forty years into a business and they knock you out in five minutes, what could I do, let them take forty years, let them take my life away.

BILL MOYERS: The versatile John Lithgow is with me now. Welcome, John, to the Journal.

JOHN LITHGOW: Wonderful to be here, Bill.

BILL MOYERS: That scene, that gut-wrenching revelation, when a son learns the awful truth about his father. I mean, the night I was there, the whole audience was suspended in shock. How do you explain that scene to yourself?

JOHN LITHGOW: The scene comes probably about 90 minutes into the play, and the audience has just gotten to know these two men, so well, this father and this son, and Miller just structures it in this extraordinary way, if you think back to the first act, when you were just getting to know them. It's such a warm and wonderful relationship to all appearances. They shadowbox and they roughhouse.

You even see Joe Keller playing with a little boy, a little neighbor boy. He's one of those great guys, like the neighborhood great guy. And his son adores him. He has an idolatrous relationship with him. To set that up, and then see the scales fall from the boy's eyes. The boy, he's 32 years old, and to see his father's failings and have it just fall on him like a ton of bricks, it's just an incredible emotional rupture.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think at that moment, when you know what's happening to the audience? Are you smiling to yourself and saying, "I got 'em again."

JOHN LITHGOW: Yes, I do. That's my guilty secret. It's a great pleasure to torture an audience like that.

BILL MOYERS: But you know it. I mean, because I can't tell whether it's John Lithgow there or Joe Keller.

JOHN LITHGOW: Well, that's the mystery of acting, isn't it? There's a tremendous amount of calculation, sort of blended with the spontaneity of the moment. You just try to induce that and create the impression of the first time.

BILL MOYERS: I'm going to let you in on a secret. I had the star role in my high school play, One Foot in Heaven, and when it was over, our teacher Julia Garrett called me aside and said quietly, "You know, Bill, I think you ought to go into journalism." But I am curious, because I took that other course, obviously. How do you do it every night? How do you go to such a volatile place, time and time again? I mean, I know you all have your techniques, but this seems to transcend technique.

JOHN LITHGOW: Technique is an enormous element of it, because I do it eight times a week. I did last night. I'll do it about five hours from now. I have to be ready to do it, whether I feel like it or not. You simply find ways of just inducing the moment for yourself. It is a kind of sorcery, I guess, and the audience is in on it. I mean, that's the interesting transaction. It's not just what an actor does. It's the audience agreeing.

BILL MOYERS: Do you have any idea of what Arthur Miller might have wanted us to think and see at that moment?

JOHN LITHGOW: I think he wanted to really throttle people with emotion. He felt that it was important, that the people onstage be stretched to an emotional extreme, to have them tortured and to have the audience tortured, to take everybody through this cathartic experience.

It's wonderful to be a part of something that sort of reawakens Arthur Miller, sort of re-imagines him for you. As you noted, this is a 60-year old play, and it is fantastic to perform it and have this kind of impact for an audience today, and to resonate with everything that's on their minds. It's just, one tends to begin to take Arthur Miller for granted, periodically. And you need a new, sort of restorative production every ten years or so, to remind people that he's our great playwright.

BILL MOYERS: There's a fascinating convergence on Broadway right now, a number of revivals that are throwing a searchlight on human greed. David Mamet has two plays back in which he portrays the free enterprise system as a verbal con game. Horton Foote, is back with Dividing the Estate about what happens when a family runs out of money. And then there's you in All My Sons. It does seem to be speaking to the moment.

JOHN LITHGOW: One of the reasons I wanted to do this, and why Simon McBurney, the very kind of radical director from England wanted to take it on, was how it spoke to our historical moment. That was a play written right after a war. Issues of war death, war profiteering, accountability for mistakes made during wartime. All of these are our obsession right now. Joe Keller, his sin was, letting a moment pass when he should have stopped something.

And letting it pass, in order that he should continue to prosper and thrive and benefit and profit from the war. That was his great sin. If nothing had gone wrong, if these engine parts had not mis-functioned he would have been fine. And no one would have known about his sin. But 21 men died, because of what he did. And he still pretends that it didn't happen. And when it's revealed, he has to be held accountable.

Well, this is our era of accountability. I mean, aren't you dying to know who let these various moments pass? Who allowed some memo to get sent which turned us into a nation that tortures? Or who allowed faulty intelligence to pass across the desk without saying, No, no, no, no. Don't, this can't go any further than here, because it's wrong. Somewhere along the line, people are accountable. And everybody wants to know.

And Miller, this enormously principled man with this gigantic social conscience, he constructs a story which moves us so much because it involves this man and his own two sons. And he learns that he is responsible, not directly, but indirectly, for the death of one of his sons by suicide. This is such a colossal moment of accounting for him. Miller has him, fall on his own sword, metaphorically.

It's the only way he can punish himself for this. You know, which is, it's a somewhat redemptive but terribly, terribly sad and tragic moment. Miller really makes demands on us. He says we have to be accountable.

BILL MOYERS: How do you explain the difference in doing that and 3rd Rock from the Sun?

JOHN LITHGOW: Well, in fact, 3rd Rock was very much a theatre experience. It's what I loved about it. You would spend five days preparing a 23-minute piece of comedy and you'd perform it for a live audience. And it's your only chance to get it right. And you count on giving them a great show and making them laugh really hard. It was very, very exhilarating, but it was like sketch acting, like revue acting. Everything was so fast and so buoyant.

VOLUNTEER: Here's a list of candidates and referendums. So you are all set. You come back here in two weeks to vote.

[JOHN LITHGOW as DICK SOLOMON]: Right, how many times do I get to vote?

VOLUNTEER: One time.

[JOHN LITHGOW as DICK SOLOMON]: And it doesn't matter that I'm brilliant.

VOLUNTEER: No.

[JOHN LITHGOW as DICK SOLOMON]: Have you noticed how tall I am?

VOLUNTEER: We all get one vote.

[JOHN LITHGOW as DICK SOLOMON]: So your opinion counts equally with mine?

VOLUNTEER: You got it.

[JOHN LITHGOW as DICK SOLOMON]: You're awfully smug for a man at a folding table.

JOHN LITHGOW: And you did it. And it was really disposable. It's done. You're onto the next one. Literally, the next morning, you're starting to prepare the next one.

All My Sons or a play like this, an experience like this, it's carefully perfecting something. I mean, we're still discovering things after having done it 80 times. It's like polishing a jewel, and getting it just right. And of course, you take away all the trappings of the cameras and the stagehands and everybody running in front of the actors. This is simplifying.

BILL MOYERS: 3rd Rock was so successful. Did it change your - did it change how you thought of yourself when you went out on the street the next day?

JOHN LITHGOW: Yes. Oh yes.

BILL MOYERS: How?

JOHN LITHGOW: It radically changes everything. You become such common currency, because you're in people's homes. And people know me as a zany, which is fine. It's fine. It's the one thing I was hesitant about, doing an episodic comedy, because I was afraid it would define me. It would be too hard to play other roles. But I think I managed to escape that, just because, well, I had a big backlog of very different roles beforehand. And as soon as it ended, I had the good sense to go right back to the theatre. I didn't even try to mess around with my public image. I just went back to the theatre, where you can do - you can play extremely different parts and your audience is a tiny fraction of your television audience.

BILL MOYERS: Do you have a favorite role out of all of those that you've done?

JOHN LITHGOW: Well, of course, there were many wonderful movie experiences, Garp, and I loved the Twilight Zone movie.

BILL MOYERS: And you played there-

JOHN LITHGOW: The man terrified of the monster on the wing of the plane.

A great old classic Twilight Zoneepisode. But I think my favorite work has been some of my stage work, M. Butterfly on stage, The Changing Room, which was my very first Broadway show. There were a couple of wonderful company productions I was in, like Trelawney of the Wells, and Comedians, and the two musicals I've done in the last few years, Sweet Smell of Success and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Such an unbelievable lark. I mean, every actor should have the thrill of starring in a Broadway musical comedy.

BILL MOYERS: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the villain, you were amazing.

JOHN LITHGOW: So much fun.

BILL MOYERS: I thought I would not be able, watching All My Sons, to forget that, but I was wrong. I mean, you disappeared then-

JOHN LITHGOW: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: Joe Keller came back, but that was-

JOHN LITHGOW: Well, that's the great challenge is to try to completely deceive an audience, yet again. To make them forget all they ever saw of you, because of what's happening right now.

BILL MOYERS: Deceit as a means of truth.

JOHN LITHGOW: Yeah, that's right. That's what I do. I always say, "I lie for a living."

BILL MOYERS: I went home that night from watching your performance, and as I was turning out the light, my eye fell on your book The Poets' Corner and I was suddenly mindful of the fact that there's a poem in it that goes to this. It's Randall Jarrell's poem. And Randall Jarrell, I don't think there's enough appreciation for him in the country. He actually taught at my alma mater for a few years, at the University of Texas. You know, perhaps our first war poet. And you've got a small poem in your book, one of your favorites, right?

JOHN LITHGOW: Yeah, you think about the play, All My Sons, that's like a symphony. Randall Jarrell writes chamber music compared to that. You know, it's so succinct, but I'll read it.

BILL MOYERS: Set it up first. It's called...

JOHN LITHGOW: The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner. The ball turret it's a little bulge near the back end of the fuselage of the old flying fortresses, the B-17s. And they had machine guns, and you could spin around and shoot in all directions from that little ball turret. And the ball turret gunner was absolutely the most dangerous member of the crew of a B-17.

BILL MOYERS: Very vulnerable.

JOHN LITHGOW: Because there was literally a target, hanging right on the belly of the airplane.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

"From my mother's sleep, I fell into the State, and I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose."

It's a very womb-like image, and you do think, what does a young man think of when he's facing death? Probably his mother. And it's just incredibly evocative of the deaths of these soldiers in the play.

BILL MOYERS: This pull of the sentence, where did it come from for you?

JOHN LITHGOW: My dad was a Shakespeare fanatic. He created Shakespeare festivals and produced them in Ohio when I was growing up. And he was also a great storyteller and a reader of stories to all of us kids.

It was just in our household, and of course, I did a huge amount of acting as a young kid. I was one of the princes in the tower. I was Mustardseed in Midsummer Night's Dream. Shakespeare just washed over me like a warm bath, you know, as I was growing up. I didn't really intend to be an actor. I had other interests. I was much more interested in being an artist, but I went off to college and started acting and I realized, "Well, I'd better give into it. This is my destiny." But I've always had that deep background.

BILL MOYERS: You've got a Shakespeare poem in there. Was that one of your father's? Does it make you think of your father? Is that why you included it?

JOHN LITHGOW: I actually read it at my father's memorial service. It's my favorite. It's one of my favorite pieces of Shakespeare. I mean, it's a sustained poem. It's actually, some call it a song, from Cymbeline, and it's Shakespeare's great eulogy,

It's called, Fear no more the heat o' the sun.

"Fear no more the heat o' the sun, nor the furious winter's rages; Thou, thy worldly task hast done, home art gone, and ta'en thy wages: Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust. Fear no more the frown o' the great; Thou art past the tyrant's stroke: Care no more to clothe and eat; to thee, the reed is as the oak. The scepter, learning, physic, must all follow this, and come to dust.

Fear no more the lightning-flash, nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone; fear not slander, censure rash; Thou hast finish'd, joy and moan: All lovers young, all lovers must consign to thee, and come to dust. No exerciser harm thee! Nor no witchcraft charm thee! Ghost unlaid forbear thee! Nothing ill come near thee! Quiet consummation have; and renowned it be thy grave."

BILL MOYERS: Who was it, who said, if you ask a young man why he wants to be a poet and he says, "I have something important I want to say," then he's not going be a poet. But if you ask him, "Why do you want to be a poet?" And he says, "Because I love the play of the word, the language." Then you know he's going to be a poet.

JOHN LITHGOW: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: And you know, I'm not sure what importance that is saying. I mean, I know that's saying something important, but it's the play of the language that holds you.

JOHN LITHGOW: You have no idea. The interesting thing about that poem is: it's a colossal joke. That beautiful poem, which is spoken so deeply from the heart about mortality and the ephemeral nature of life. Well, that's spoken by two brothers, over the dead body of a young man who was their dear friend.

Well, first of all, it's not a young man, it's a woman dressed as a young man. And second, the young woman is not dead. So it's Shakespeare's crazy joke, to write this beautiful piece of poetry, and have these two guys completely oblivious.

BILL MOYERS: I've often-I've wondered sometimes if Shakespeare might, where ever the great poets gather, be sitting on a corner with Ogden Nash. Comparing their almost mischievous view of life that reflects itself in different.

JOHN LITHGOW: Boy did he love the twists and turns of language. I mean the puns and the jokes and the ironies. Fantastic, and that's a fabulous example of it. I mean, you can't find a more moving piece of writing. And the fact that it's all a misdirect is just wonderful.

BILL MOYERS: Tell me about Ina Lithgow.

JOHN LITHGOW: Ah. Ina B. Lithgow is my grandmother, my father's mom. And she lived to the age of 95. And she recited long, long poems to us. I mean, really long.

BILL MOYERS: Epic poems?

JOHN LITHGOW: Epic poems by Longfellow and The Wreck of the Hesperus and The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, and she knew them all by heart. And in her 80s, she could still remember them, start to finish, and without missing a single syllable. I just remember being astounded by this.

BILL MOYERS: Do you remember any of the poems she read to you?

JOHN LITHGOW: Actually, I did learn one of them.

BILL MOYERS: Go ahead. We don't have time for it.

JOHN LITHGOW: No, no. It takes about seven minutes to recite, so I will tell you about it, though. It's Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem, The Deacon's Masterpiece, or the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay, which in fact is about a handsome carriage.

BILL MOYERS: One horse carriage.

JOHN LITHGOW: That's right. That was built to last, built by the deacon of all the very, very best materials, and sure enough, it lasts in perfect, perfect condition until it turns exactly 100 years old, at which point it flies into a million pieces. And my grammy used to recite this, and I can't say for sure, but it may just have been my first insight into poetry, my first sort of metaphorical leap. Maybe it occurred to me that my 80-year-old grammy, in such superb mental shape, was the wonderful one-hoss shay.

BILL MOYERS: Who lasted almost 100 years-

JOHN LITHGOW: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: -and then was gone.

JOHN LITHGOW: I will recite you the very end of it.

"What do you think the parson found, when he got up and looked around? The poor old chaise, in a heap or mound, as if it had been to the mill and ground! You see, of course, if you're not a dunce, how it went to pieces all at once. All at once and nothing first, Just as bubbles do when they burst. End of the wonderful one-hoss shay. Logic is logic. That's all I say."

BILL MOYERS: That's a turn. "Logic is logic." What is he saying?

JOHN LITHGOW: Well, the very beginning of it is: "Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay, that was built in such a logical way? It lasted [sic] 100 years to a day." So...

BILL MOYERS: Is it true that you once held forth with your first girlfriend, with Walt Whitman?

JOHN LITHGOW: So, you are intent on embarrassing-

Yes, yes. I think, like many, many people, including Bill Clinton, I might add, I recited Leaves of Grass, to my first girlfriend.

BILL MOYERS: But you didn't marry her.

JOHN LITHGOW: No, no. It was fabulously romantic summer travel trip to France, and oh, I was such an insufferable young aesthete. Can you imagine me, reading poetry, on the banks of the Loire, you know.

BILL MOYERS: Well, I can actually. But I'm wondering when I heard about that, I was wondering why you didn't read her Elizabeth Barrett Browning, you know.

JOHN LITHGOW: I do have...

BILL MOYERS: You have an Elizabeth Barrett Browning-

JOHN LITHGOW: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: -poem in here.

JOHN LITHGOW: Why don't I read that too?

BILL MOYERS: Yeah.

JOHN LITHGOW: Talk about the ardor of language.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah. Yeah. The passion of romance.

JOHN LITHGOW: This is Sonnet 43, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which you will certainly recognize.

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depths and breadths and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of being and ideal grace. I love thee to the level of every day's Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for right. I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints! I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death."

BILL MOYERS: Do you think people still respond to that kind of poetry?

JOHN LITHGOW: Well, I think that's the magic of archaic language. I think it sort of takes us back in time. I mean, it's the beauty of Shakespeare. It's his turn of phrase, in a language that's 400 years old. And it's like music. I always feel that I'm an actor.

I'm a performer. And an entertainer. Almost everything I do, in these areas, is using words. And there are these three aspects to a turn of phrase, the meaning, the emotion, and the music. And well, Arthur Miller, he'll write a line like: "Sure, he was my son. But I think to him, they were all my sons. And I guess they were. I guess they were."

Well, that's a very rough poetry, but in its way, it's poetic. It has meaning, music and emotion. Well, Shakespeare, a line like "Aye but to die and go we know not where, to lie and cold obstruction and to rot." I mean, that's language of 400 years ago, but the music of that language and the emotion and the thought. It's just as compelling. It's just a very different kind of music. It's like listening to Erik Satie and Bach, you know.

BILL MOYERS: Didn't you do a ballet, once, to Saint-Saëns-

JOHN LITHGOW: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: -The Carnival?

JOHN LITHGOW: Yeah, The Carnival of the Animals.

BILL MOYERS: The Carnival, and you were in the ballet?

JOHN LITHGOW: Well it was one of those unbelievable little detours I took. I have a good friend, Christopher Wheeldon, who's an internationally celebrated ballet choreographer. He choreographed a musical I was in on Broadway, and we became good friends. He knew about my rhyming children's books.

And he asked me to turn Saint-Saëns suite of 14 Divertimenti into a story ballet, with a narration, and to be the narrator. And of course, I was ecstatic at the idea, to be up onstage, narrating a ballet, with all these City Ballet dancers. So, I made up a story of a little boy, locked overnight in a museum, falling asleep and dreaming that all the people he knew were animals, like his librarian was this shy kangaroo.

The boys on the wrestling team were the jackasses. His piano teacher was this baboon. Well, the school nurse was named Mabel Bunts, this huge, fat, she was the elephant. And I was very pleased with this creation. Mabel Bunts, the school nurse, and Chris said, "Well, this is great, but you have to play Mabel Bunts." And I did. And that's how I became a guest dancer with the New York City Ballet.

BILL MOYERS: And is there any video of that available? Are you safely...

JOHN LITHGOW: It's suppressed.

BILL MOYERS: What about the music, and emotion, in Ogden Nash?

I know that Nash is a favorite of yours, right?

JOHN LITHGOW: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: What about the music there?

JOHN LITHGOW: Well-

BILL MOYERS: So contemporary.

JOHN LITHGOW: Well, yes, it's comical music. It's doggerel. I, and one of the reasons why I love Nash is, to the extent I write poetry at all, I write daffy doggerel for little children. But Ogden Nash is kind of my patron saint. And it's musical, all right, but it's musical the way Spike Jones is musical.

This is Ogden Nash's comical poem, No Doctors Today, Thank You.

"They tell me that euphoria is the feeling of feeling wonderful, well, today, I feel euphorian, Today I have the agility of a Greek god and the appetite of a Victorian. Yes, today I may even go forth without my galoshes, Today, I am a swashbuckler, would anybody like me to buckle any swashes? This is my euphorian day, I will ring welkins and before anybody answers I will run away. I will tame me a caribou And bedeck it with marabou. I will pen me my memoirs. Ah youth, youth! What euphorian days them was! I wasn't much of a hand for the boudoirs, I was generally to be found where the food was. Does anybody want any flotsam? I've gotsam. Does anybody want any jetsam? I can getsam. I can play chopsticks on the Wurlitzer, I can speak Portuguese like a Berlitzer. I can don or doff my shoes without tying or untying the laces because I am wearing moccasins, And I practically know the difference between serums and antitoccasins. Kind people, don't think me purse-proud, don't set me down as vainglorious, I'm just a little euphorious.

BILL MOYERS: Oh, I love that. Euphorious. A word without meaning, but which is invested with feeling.

You get it, even if you don't get it, right?

JOHN LITHGOW: Yeah. He just loved music. He loved to almost caricature language.

BILL MOYERS: And yet, on the other side of the street, and across from that in your book, there's a very short one that takes us somewhere else, by Gwendolyn Brooks.

JOHN LITHGOW: Oh yes. This book has accompanying it a wonderful CD of great actors reciting all the poems, and I managed to persuade my friend Morgan Freeman to recite this Gwendolyn Brooks' poem.

MORGAN FREEMAN:

"We real cool. We Left school. We

Lurk late. We Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We Die soon."

JOHN LITHGOW: "We die soon." It's a very scary, very spare poem. It reminds me, you know, the last three words, "We die soon." I remember a comic version of this poem in a "New Yorker" cartoon, of two inner-city kids sitting on a stoop, little kids. And one saying to the other, "What are you going to be if you grow up?"

BILL MOYERS: If you grow up-

JOHN LITHGOW: Yeah.

It's what we were talking about before regarding All My Sons, is startling people with something so emotional. It's scaring them, almost. Scaring them and making them feel the hurt. All of us kind of need that emotional exercise. I think that's what art is about. I mean, certainly serious, dark art, as opposed to comic art, is to make you feel the pain.

BILL MOYERS: Some of the shortest poems are the most powerful.

You've got one in there by William Carlos Williams, To a Poor Old Woman.

JOHN LITHGOW: Yes.

To A Poor Old Woman

munching a plum on the street a paper bag of them in her hand

They taste good to her They taste good to her. They taste good to her

You can see it by the way she gives herself to the one half sucked out in her hand

Comforted a solace of ripe plums seeming to fill the air They taste good to her"

Feel the pain and desolation of that. And yet, she savors a plum in exactly the same way we savor a plum. You know, we who don't experience anything near the pain she experiences.

BILL MOYERS: What inspired this book?

JOHN LITHGOW: I did a favor for a friend of my wife's, a colleague of my wife's. They asked me to host a reception for, they had two autistic children, these people, and they were a part of a marvelous organization in Orange County called Access, Creative Approaches to Education for Autistic Kids.

And it had an unbelievable impact on me. All of the people there were the parents of autistic children. That's the one thing they all had in common. In every other way, they were completely different from each other, economically, ethnically, and I think very few of them had ever heard poems read out loud in a poetry reading.

Well, I got this sheaf of poems, that they, these good people had laid out for me. And they started with very familiar poems, Robert Frost, Auden, Yeats. And then the further I read, there were a series of poems by a woman, the mother of an autistic child, and the final two poems were written by a 25-year-old autistic woman. The audience, listening to these poems, was completely overwhelmed by them. They knew the import of every single sentence in these poems, even obscure, difficult poems. It was so intense.

I mean, the wonderful thing about these people was that they were so powerful and positive and proactive about their own children. You know, and hopeful. And I, it was just this incredible moment. And you know, I think I was 55 years old at the time, and I was taught a real lesson, that I had never known before, just how powerful words can be.

BILL MOYERS: It was Dylan Thomas who said, "Too much poetry to-day is flat on the page, a black and white thing of words created by intelligences that no longer think it necessary for a poem to be read and understood by anything but eyes."

So let's go out as you take this poem off the page.

JOHN LITHGOW: Okay. This is a wonderful poem and since we've been speaking so much about fathers and sons. This is a poem I read for a friend of mine, when his father passed away, at that memorial service. It's called, Do not go gentle into that good night.

"Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

BILL MOYERS: John Lithgow, thank you very much for being with us on the Journal.

JOHN LITHGOW: What a pleasure.