314. Plato Was Right to Throw Poets Out of The Republic. Alas.

It has taken me 66 years but I finally realize that Plato was right about the place of poets in a republic and my New Critic masters were wrong. 

Yes, wrong, those critics and teachers who took on all the scientists and materialist philosophers in the university and proclaimed that no, poems were not sugar-coating applied to truth, they were Truth itself.  Not just Beauty.  If you weren't finding the pearls you hadn't been reading the poem closely enough.  Or you'd been listening to Plato.

I know, those critics have been taken down a notch or two.  The Church of Holy Art, with its altars to Donne and Eliot, has lost its worshippers, and there are no more priests teaching English courses.  But still, who could really be wise without reading novels and plays and poems?  Didn't the flame in Shelley's pages tell us as much about politics as the facts in Tocqueville's?

But now my attention has been called (NYT Book Review, 8-30-15) to Juliana Spahr, a poet who addresses issues every citizen of this republic needs to be concerned about — air pollution, the faults of capitalism, the relations of corporations to human beings.  Her latest book is apparently full of flame — about the BP oil spill, the dispersal of Occupy Wall Street protesters by police, the price of Brent crude, birds displaced from their flight path — and the poem the reviewer, Stephen Burt, finds most moving will give you an idea.  She is nursing her child.  "I hold out my hand/ I hand over/ and I pass on. . . . I hold out my hand and take engine oil additive into me and then I pass on this engine oil additive to this other thing that once was me, this not really me."  The reviewer, warmed to her causes, apparently speaks for a wide readership.

I think of the poem that first inflamed me, one by Robert Burns, recited by my Scottish highland grandmother:

'Scots, wha hae wi Wallace bled,

Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,

Welcome tae yer gory bed,

Or tae victorie. . . .

'Lay the proud usurpers low,

Tyrants fall in every foe,

Liberty's in every blow! -

Let us do or dee.

That'll heat a kid up, I'll tell you.  But I cooled off.  At university when I got looking around for examples in history of forces that had worked successfully for peace I discovered that the force of commerce, channeled by Scottish lowlanders (my flame-resistant grandfather was a lowlander), had brought a remarkably long period of peace and prosperity to Scotland, once she had united with England.  And the biggest obstacles to peace were inflamed highlanders, magnifying (with the help of Walter Scott) their essentially street-gang warlords into splendidly patriotic Chiefs. 

And that's what sank Burns as an educator in politics: discovery of complexity, the play of different needs and forces and narratives and world-pictures against each other.  Always requiring trade-offs and compromises.  Burns was for kids. 

It's sort of like saying that in the end English Composition trumps Creative Writing.  What I think Mario Cuomo had in mind when he said, "You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose." 

And isn't that bound to be?  The poet accepts, for the sake of compression and effect, the vagueness that is the great sin in Composition.  "I  can't spend all day explaining."  Emerson speaks for all poets.

Here's Shelley in hottest flame:

Rough wind, that moanest loud

Grief too sad for song;

Wild wind, when sullen cloud

Knells all the night long;

Sad storm whose tears are vain,

Bare woods, whose branches strain,

Deep caves and dreary main,—

Wail, for the world's wrong!

And in vaguest mode.  To young Shelley opposite him the comp tutor says, sarcastically, "Can you think of anything less specific than 'the world's wrong'"?  In response Shelley can't say, "I'll leave specifics to the reader."  Not to this fellow.  He's in the business of getting young writers to make things easy for readers, to take care of them.

So don't expect Juliana Spahr to make clear the connection between engine-oil additive and the wrongs of our time.  That's for scholars, set (first by Plato) in academies to seek truth, sifting through all the needs and forces and narratives and world-pictures.  "Scholarly articles are truth and truth is scholarly articles."  Accept that, find it beautiful, and you are no longer a kid.

I know, that's sad.  But first things first.