EXCEPTION TAKEN
Note: I've shifted this article from the ESSAYS page to make room there for newer work. "Exception" proved unpublishable in both the mainstream media and poetry websites because it implicitly criticizes Israel.
David Orr, in the July/August issue of POETRY, expresses his skepticism (at considerable length) that poets in any age have written about politics to good effect. He’s mostly concerned with the ineptitude of recent American poets, but he also leaves the impression that poets have never been much good at changing minds about large public issues. It’s certainly true that politically motivated poetry is not always great poetry. But often it is—and survives with its art and its force intact. Some political poetry that hasn’t aged well was nevertheless effective and stirring within the literary idiom of its own age.
Orr’s presumption is to assume, rather than document, poetry’s historical irrelevance to political awareness. For instance, he dismisses Shelley’s claims (made in “A Defense of Poetry”) that “the most unfailing herald, companion, or follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution is poetry” and that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators (more…)