Poetry and Politics
The Andrea Mitchell Center is pleased to announce a new initiative, “Poetry and Politics,” in which the Center will pursue the interrelation between poetry broadly defined (poetry proper, literature, and imaginative works of philosophy) and democratic politics. The aspiration is to probe the intersections between aesthetics and politics, hopeful that poetic analysis and political analysis might be mutually enriching. The Mitchell Center is pleased to welcome Owen Boynton, a literary scholar and teacher, to spearhead the program by interpreting poetic works in posts that will be shared periodically with the Mitchell Center community.
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[NEW] Hugh MacDiarmid's Patriotism
The patriotism of Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978)—his proud love for Scotland—would not be the stuff of poetry worth reading, except that he wonders at it and allows it to become a mystery to him, and the poetry to become the means for searching that mystery. How, the poetry asks, are we to make sense of so strange and so strong a love?
Marina Tsvetaeva: Time’s Émigré
This post reads Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s (1892-1941) intimate lyrics of separation against her prose writings about poetry’s relationship to time, suggesting how these lyrics, though intensely private, are records of life as an émigré, albeit one in exile from her nation’s history.
Even when occasioned by intensely private, idiosyncratic experiences, Emily Dickinson orients herself by metaphors that invoke the ground of politics: a public life of deliberation and manners, the hard compromise of living alongside strangers. Nor does she invoke this world as a mere foil to her inner life; instead, her poems imply that those values and norms upon which politics depend have purchase beyond mundane existence, and that even if they are of this world, they will only be redeemed beyond it.
T.S. Eliot's "Coriolan" and Political Tragedy
T.S. Eliot’s Coriolan is his greatest political poem: in it, he writes about the tragic limits and consequences of politics—of any persuasion, as a sphere—in modern life. Written in the early 1930s, Coriolan expresses Eliot’s sense of impending doom and his fatalism, but also expresses, with tender delicacy, Eliot’s deepening faith that the restless heart might find glimpses of a more lasting peace, at a still point beyond worldly affairs.
[NEW] Nietzsche’s Strength, Poetry’s Strength
This post interprets Nietzsche’s controversial “will to power” as an expression of his more sure-footed discussions of strength, arguing that his elevation of strength to a central position, over and against morality or truth, allows us to grasp something at work in poetry and criticism alike; it points to how the study of poetry, and the training of criticism, may be elements of a civic education, since aesthetic judgments, like political judgments, are bound by assessments and interpretations of strength. Though the post focuses on examples of literary criticism, it argues that, with “strength,” Nietzsche, despite his rejection of Kantian moral philosophy, offers a concept that has the same formal structure as Kant’s categorial imperative, with the crucial difference that strength is embodied.
William Wordsworth and a Poem's Strength
William Wordsworth’s poetry is an occasion to consider the importance of strength as a concept in politics and art alike. Wordsworth takes human strength as a mystery and recurring topic in some of his greatest poems, overtly political and otherwise. This post will read Wordsworth’s poetry as illuminating a modern conception of strength alive in political and poetic thought alike.
William Wordsworth and Nature’s Republic
Wordsworth’s epic The Prelude recounts the growth of the poet’s mind. Central to that growth was Wordsworth’s time in Revolutionary France, which occupies Books Nine and Ten of the Thirteen-Book edition of 1805. This post reads those books in light of the Ninth and Tenth Books of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and also in light of Dan Edelstein’s 2009 study of the role of natural law, and the rhetoric of natural republicanism, in the violence that became the Terror. It suggests a reading of Wordsworth that sees the political significance of the language of “nature” as redefined by the Revolution and nearly destroyed by it—only to recovered again in the very writing of The Prelude.
Geoffrey Hill and “Platonic old England”
Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016) is one of the great European poets of the twentieth century, whose engagement with history and civic life is unmatched by his British contemporaries. This post reads several of the poems in which he bemoans what England has become while apprehending, especially in its landscape, what power the ideals of a commonwealth possess.
Walt Whitman and the Muscular Imagination
The muscular imagination—close kin to proprioception—allows readers to move through the field of energy that is a work of literature; we imagine what it would be to experience the words, subject, and occasion of a text bodily, and we apprehend its balance and appreciate it aesthetically. This post explains what that means and then explains how the same line of thinking can help us grasp what Walt Whitman is up to in poems that apprehend the body politic, in both senses of that phrase.
Lorine Niedecker’s Political Sanity
Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), one of America’s finest twentieth-century poets, was among a leftist (communist and socialist) politically active group of poets in the 1930s, including George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky, though her poetry shows fainter traces of her political commitments than theirs. She is mostly known for her unusually brief poems, fossil-specimens chipped from the crags of her experience. This post reads one of the most famous of her brief poems, using it to guide an understanding of how politics features in one of the best of the long poems she wrote later, in the 1960s, when her art flared up in new brilliance.
William Blake's "Visions of the Daughters of Albion"
William Blake, engraver and poet, wrote the most widely anthologized and read short lyric poems in English, notably “The Tyger.” He also wrote some of his most brilliant poetry in lengthy “diffuse epics” that defy categorization and baffle critics eager to systematize what seems to be Blake’s idiosyncratic family of myths and symbols. Continuous through the short lyrics and the epics is an intense dissatisfaction with Britain and its deepest held beliefs and assumptions about humanity, God, and nature. Holding State, Church, and “society” mutually responsible for the often stifled, sometimes unexpressed and even inexpressible miseries around him, Blake’s poetry is political in the deepest sense, seeing the failures of the nation’s politics as consequences of deeper failures in a social imagination that shackled human life—and especially its erotic energies. “Visions of the Daughters of Albion” is one of the most approachable of Blake’s strange long-lined works; it is also one of the most focused in its denunciation of British, and broadly Christian, beliefs about women, marriage, and sex.
John Clare (1793-1864) is one of the great poets of the nineteenth century. Celebrated in his own day as a poet of the uneducated rural peasantry, he is now recognized for his profound and broad view of the life of the natural world, as well as the fragility of self-identity. This post situates his poetry in relation to the agricultural practice of land enclosure (making common lands private), suggesting that Clare does not oppose enclosure but opposes one narrow conception of it.
Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) wrote some of the greatest and earliest English lyric poetry at the court of Henry VIII, under the monarch’s menacing gaze. His poetry is political in circumstance as well as substance, but its brilliance as poetry lies in what it makes of its political condition: its being at the mercy of extraordinary power. This post offers a general account of Wyatt’s poetry, readings of several of his poems, and an account of the selfhood of poetry.
John Milton's "On the Late Massacher in Piedmont"
John Milton’s sonnet “On the Late Massacher in Piedmont” is the first great political sonnet in English, an occasion poem that far exceeds its occasion, both in its substance and in its impact in literary history. This post offers a close reading of the poem, arguing that its religious significance is determined by its sense of political justice and political history.
Christina G. Rossetti and the Consequence of Promising
Christina G. Rossetti (1830-1894) is one of the great Victorian poets. This essay makes the claim that her poetry implicitly challenges many of the assumptions necessary for political thought, with radical implications for what it means to commit to political actions or orders.
Charles Baudelaire and the Art of Declamation
Charles Baudelaire’s poetry draws on a rhetorical mode rare in English poetry: declamation. This verse discusses the historical, social, and political implications of that mode as it pertains to Baudelaire’s poetry and more broadly.
Jim Powell’s latest collection, the chapbook Assembling the Bomb, carries on from his previous collection, Substrate, in renewing Modernism’s anthropological foundations, updating them and transposing them to the United States, and especially to the American West. Powell’s poetry allows for an approach to American culture that avoids a totalizing imagination of its essence but that nonetheless suggests that American history and the American continent consist of parts that do form some greater whole.
John Donne and the Sense for Privacy
John Donne (1572-1631) is not often thought of as a political poet, but this post argues that Donne’s sensitive renderings of the relations of private to public make him a foundational figure in the consciousness of publicness that underlies modern liberalism. It reads his metaphysical concerns—the one and the many, change and permanence, being and non-being—as finding expression and inspiration in his understanding of public and private life.
Andrew Marvell's "An Horatian Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland"
Andrew Marvell’s “An Horatian Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” is one of the great political poems in English. It also demonstrates how an ever-vigilant apprehension of the possible can chasten assumptions about what is necessary or inevitable in the struggle for power. This post offers a close reading of Marvell’s Ode, directing attention to the political significance of its ambiguities and uncertainties.
Robert Lowell and the Recovery of Public Life
Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was the most famous American poet of the mid-20th century. Featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1967 (wearing a crown of thorns, no less), he was, in biographical terms, perhaps the last public poet. His poetry, though, most frequently takes as a central preoccupation a recovery of a private self. This post explores the tension of private life and public life in Lowell’s poetry from the 1950s to the late 1960s.
John Dryden's "Absalom and Achitophel"
John Dryden (1631-1700) was the great poet of Restoration England, and “Absalom and Achitophel” is among his greatest poems. Published in 1681 at the height of the exclusion crisis that would deny King Charles II’s brother James the throne, on account of the latter’s Catholicism, the poem lampoons the opponents of the Stuart line of succession by way of an extended parallel with the story of David and Absalom from the Book of Samuel. This post considers how Dryden adapts and reconfigures the political concerns of the Biblical story in light of his era’s preoccupation with sovereignty and the popular will.
This post brings the poet-critic William Empson into dialogue with Jürgen Habermas, focusing especially on the central portion of the first volume of his recent Also a History of Philosophy: The Project of a Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking to explore what it might mean to return to the path Empson cleared in 1935 and to read literature in relation to Durkheim’s conceptions of ritual and social integration.
Audre Lorde and the Intimacy of Scrutiny
This post takes as its subject the essays and poetry of Audre Lorde (1934-1992), a leading figure of the 1970s Black Arts Movement. This essay relates her political affirmation of (an individual’s) difference to the poetic imagination that reconciles difference and similarity and reads her poems as accounts of what it means to strive for the discovery and preservation of a difference that has political force.
This post takes up poet-critic William Empson, most famous these days for his precocious first critical work, Seven Types of Ambiguity, but admired as a poet of real stature and promise in the 1930s, when he taught in Japan and China. It was his time in Tokyo in the early 1930s that would yield the poem that is the focus here: “Aubade,” a poem of political action (and inaction) in which the principles of private conduct are extended and transformed in the sphere of international politics.
Robert Burns' "Is there for Honest Poverty"
In honor of Burns Night, this post reads one of the great affirmations of egalitarian human dignity in English: Robert Burns’ “Is There for Honest Poverty.”
Literary Criticism, Civic Disagreement, and Education
This post departs from attending to one poet to consider a broad and long tradition of literary criticism—what might be called evaluative criticism though it is not the same as ‘reviewing.’ It argues that our current political divides are a consequence not only of a lost framework of facts, but divides in how we imagine what must, by necessity, be a matter of conjecture and uncertainty; and that if we do not recover a sense of discerning the truth in how others imagine the world, we will be unlikely to overcome those divides. Evaluative criticism offers a training ground for doing so, if educational institutions are willing to embrace it.
This post takes as its subject (and perhaps introduces readers to) the contemporary American poet Jim Powell, devoting attention to the poetic sequence “Substrate” from the 2009 collection of the same name. The voices of “Substrate” are voices from the history of the North American West; but the sequence gains political significance for what it makes of that essential political concept, “voice”— saving “voice” from an echo chamber, voice against voice, and restoring it to the recalcitrant facticity of the world.
Lucille Clifton's "jasper texas 1998"
This post consists of a reading of “jasper texas 1998” by Lucille Clifton, finding in the poem a meditation on the political and poetic imagination in relation to hope, despair, and injustice.
Samuel Johnson's "The Vanity of Human Wishes"
This post reads Samuel Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (an imitation of Juvenal’s tenth satire). Johnson’s sensitivity to what is general and common among humankind spurs him to portray delusions and follies, political and otherwise, as the consequence of moral abstractions acting with physical force in human affairs. In so doing, he restores us to an account of political life that accommodates judgment without insisting on definitive explanations for behaviors and choices we may never fully understand.
This post develops what the relationship of public and private might mean for political poetry by reading Walt Whitman’s “The Sleepers.” It suggests that Whitman’s poetry, rather than rejecting “decorum” as an ideal for poetry, reimagines it in relation to the dignity of private life essential for democracy.
Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est"
The longstanding connection between the expressive medium of poetry and the violent political phenomenon of war illuminates how the human mind wrestles with morality, suffering, justice, duty, and friendship, to name only a few subjects. The poet and WWI soldier Wilfred Owen offers us a personal glimpse of war through his verses, and his “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1920) remains one of the most popular war poems to this day. Through an analysis of his famous poem, this post considers the broader significance of “war poetry” for foundational questions in politics and political philosophy.
Sarah Kirsch's Ice Roses: Selected Poems
Politics, rather than being a strictly public affair, involves establishing boundaries between private and public spaces. Drawing on the theoretical work of Mary Douglas, this post reads twentieth-century poet German poet Sarah Kirsch as an example of how the poetic imagination can participate in the adjudication of public and private life.
Percy Shelley's "England in 1819"
Percy Shelley is among the most politically invested poets to write in English. Reading his “England in 1819,” this post finds in the poem’s wording both a yearning for political change and an understanding of what sort of change it might be possible for a poem (or at least this poem) to bring about.
For his first post, Boynton examines Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Voice” and, along the way, further elaborates the ambition of the Mitchell Center’s new “Poetry and Politics” initiative.