Barack Obama is an elegant and literate man with a cosmopolitan sense of the world. He is widely read in philosophy, literature, and history - as befits a former law professor - and he has shown time and again a surprising interest in contemporary fiction.

Throughout his career, W.G. Sebald wrote poems that were strikingly similar to his prose. His tone, in both genres, was always understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur.

Lyrical poetry is not a big part of most people's lives. Twitter now becomes an interesting way of getting cared for language into people's space. Because there is something deep inside of us that responds to cared for language, whether it's literary, poetry, or really good lyrics in a song.

In a Transtromer poem, you inhabit space differently; a body becomes a thing, a mind floats, things have lives, and even non-things, even concepts, are alive.