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Poetry and Politics, or: Why are the Poets on the Left?
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32 Poetry and Politics, or: Why are the Poets on the Left? We don’t spend much time wondering what poetry has to do with neuroscience or television writing or college basketball, yet these are important areas of American life that involve assertions about truth, form, morality, and the nature of culture—all subjects regularly claimed as poetry’s turf. Yet the connection between poetry and politics interests us in ways that the arguably more obvious connection between poetry and linguistics does not. Why? —david orr Why are we so endlessly fascinated with the connection between poetry and politics? We keep asking about how poetry relates to the political. And when we ask about poetry and politics in the United States, we find ourselves asking another question , too: why are the poets on the political left? Lucia Perillo found herself pondering this second question after a conference call with other contributors to the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, when “some kind of anti-Bush or anti-war entendre that was uttered by someone produced among us a knowing chuckle.” One imagines the chuckle to have been of the same order as a stockbroker’s chuckle over tax-and-spend liberals : it probably had more to do with political solidarity than with wit. I have a hypothesis about poets and politics, though the hypothesis isn’t really mine, not at the root. It’s an adaptation of a passage in my dusty copy of Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In the preface to that work Marx claimed “it is not the consciousness of men 33 Poetry in a Difficult World that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” (11). Poets are no more an exception to this rule than stockbrokers. And the social being of poets in contemporary America contributes to their widespread sense—a sense not generally shared by politicians—that poetry and politics are intertwined. It influences, too, their prevalent leftishness. Both phenomena can be explained by the position poets tend to inhabit in American society. * What poets and politicians have in common, says Orr, is “a totalizing vision” of things—a sense that the problems they address aren’t merely matters of self-interest, but of more general concern. This, I’m sure, is entirely true. But why is it true of poets? It used to be a matter of national representativeness. The poet’s sense of somehow representing a community larger than the self was, in the nineteenth century, often a matter of literature’s link with nationalism. Longfellow’s yearning for an American epic provides one example; Walt Whitman’s creation of a representative American self provides another. But, despite a few striking exceptions like Robert Pinsky’s An Explanation of America (written, as Pinsky has said, with Whitman in mind), most American poets no longer think of themselves as representatives of the nation. In fact, most poets who see themselves as representative of a group are either postcolonials or members of other historically or currently oppressed groups. But the sense of a connection between poetry and politics extends beyond poets with a strong connection to identity politics. Why? We can get at something like an answer via the thinking of Alvin Gouldner, one of America’s greatest writers on the sociology of intellectuals . In his brisk little study The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, Gouldner points out that intellectuals, particularly humanistic intellectuals like poets, revel in their semi-autonomous situation vis-a-vis market forces, forces that would dictate that they pursue their own material self-interest. This isn’t to say that poets are angelic creatures devoid of self-interest. It’s merely to note that the field of poetry is somewhat insulated from market forces, if for no other reason than that the material rewards are so small—and the self-image poets cultivate [54.85.255.74] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 04:04 GMT) 34 The Poet Resigns reflects this. By and large, poets don’t tend to think of themselves as motivated primarily by material self-interest. What Gouldner says about teachers is apposite here, in part because so many poets teach, and in part because both poets and teachers tend to define themselves with reference to their cultural, rather than their material, capital. “As teachers,” Gouldner writes, “intellectuals come to be defined, and to define themselves, as responsible for and ‘representative ’ of society...