REPENT! NYRB On Why We Write Poems About the Apocalypse August 27, 2012: Malise Ruthven's latest for The New York Review of Books wonders at the power of contemplating an apocalypse, religiously, politically, and poetically. He opens with a Robert Lowell's poem, "Fall, 1961," and Thomas Merton's "Figures for an Apocalypse," saying: The idea of impending doom, whether divinely ordained or inferred by creative [...] by Harriet Staff