The last political poet in the white academic tradition (although this tradition also includes Derek Walcott) was Robert Lowell. Nobody reads Lowell anymore, although Elizabeth Bishop still has mindshare. But Lowell was a well-known participant in the antiwar movement and a scathing critic of the WASP elitism out of which he emerged as well as of the "savage servility" of US (capitalist) culture in the Eisenhower era and thereafter.
In the mid-seventies, a kind of chilled-out "archetypal" symbolism became normal in university writing departments. Looking initially to writers like Robert Bly--who himself, ironically, looked to the likes of Pablo Neruda--as well as eg the far less interesting and competent Mark Strand, this soon gave way to a kind of solemn, suburban symbolism in which one listened to the imagined voices of stones and bones and eschewed anything resembling outright satire or social commentary as elitist, pretentious, affected, and repressive. Satire in the larger sense--that is in the sense that does not include cheap-shot TV sarcastic commentary and juvenile SNL skits--is no longer possible in the United States. It's off-FEN-sive. There is some justification for this, because the "savage indignation" of the traditional satirist is frequently reactionary (Alexander Pope) and nearly always in some sense elitist. But the classical conception of satire as the thing that represents what I am told the Greeks called the "satura lanx"--the "fully charged platter" of human folly, self-deception, hypocrisy, and futility--has left a void, no matter how legitimate its demise. Can or should this void be filled? Good question. But intersectional virtue-signaling only leads to a kind of senatorial courtesy--I yield to the gentleperson's ineffable, deep tradition as expressed in unique domestic scenes, flower-arranging, and ghee--and perhaps only leads to more of the insipid stuff that has been oozing forth from workshops for at least fifty years. Pope wrote a couplet to be inscribed on the collar of a dog kept by George II at what later became Kew Gardens: I am His Majesty's dog at Kew; Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you? One wouldn't want Pope back, but how much contemporary writing can deliver a sting like that, even? -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#4739): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/4739 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79182231/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
