The American Spectator

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Patriotic Poets Society

1.29.07 @ 12:01AM

TENNYSON, ANYONE?
Re: Hal G.P. Colebatch's Where Have All the Poets Gone?

I recall an article on poetry in Commonweal almost 40 years ago that said poets mostly lost their nerve around the end of World War I. The author's main point was that the universe had seemed to become so complex, difficult, and daunting that the poets moved to writing poetry that mainly gave voice to the beat of their own heart. However good or bad some of this poetry was, its scope of vision was extremely limited. The author praised scientists for at least having the courage to be (Tillich's phrase), to try to make sense of the universe, to think with laudable creativity and daring, and to write about it.

Where that critic seemed to especially emphasize that the poets' retreat had to do with cosmological doubt and inability or unwillingness to try to grasp the mystery of the wide universe, surely there is a parallel hesitancy regarding political matters, including patriotism, as Hal G.P. Colebatch spells out so well. I also recall critic Thomas Wolfe saying that American intellectuals had been impressed with the dour negativism of Existential and Socialist critique, even though it didn't apply to the U.S.A. Indeed, it didn't apply to Europe after 1950 or so. Theologian Paul Tillich wondered where dead Existentialism would find a home after its European funeral. Wolfe effectively said that it found an inappropriate home in American academia and with American literature. And leftist theologian Gregory Baum admitted that the Marxist critique doesn't apply to the U.S.A., though that has not stopped the bloviating. By the way, Wolfe also commented on another version of covertly nihilistic thinking, deconstructionism. He said that the teachers he knew that were espousing it, didn't believe in it and were running off at night to take courses in the new biologism.

At least there's a little pop patriotic poetry in some Country Music.
-- Richard L.A. Schaefer
Dubuque Iowa

Nobel Laureate Rudyard Kipling's poetry was once so universal that even Mad Magazine could parody the poem "On the Road to Mandalay" and expect its lowbrow readership to get the joke. Now Kipling is an unperson in our schools and universities and even in our Barnes and Nobles. How we need him today!

Would to God some brave soul would stand up on the floor of the Senate, look the Murthas of the Senate in the eye, and recite "For All We Have and Are."

Once more we hear the word
That sickened earth of old:
"No law except the sword
Unsheathed and uncontrolled,"
Once more it knits mankind,
Once more the nations go
To meet and break and bind
A crazed and driven foe.

Comfort, content, delight-
The ages' slow-bought gain-
They shrivelled in a night,
Only ourselves remain
To face the naked days
In silent fortitude,
Through perils and dismays
Renewed and re-renewed.

Face facts folks! Poets like all of the rest of America need the basics such as food, shelter and water. Any poet that dares write a "patriotic" poem would be scorned out of existence, relegated to the trash heap of history and would not be allowed even, to sweep the floors of any university, let alone be recognized, in modern day America. They would be forced to sell match sticks on street corners, in bare their feet, during a subzero cat. 5 blizzard in order to survive....
-- Jim L
East Sandwich, Massachusetts

Given that "patriotism and associated values like honor, courage and respect for tradition and heritage are surely worth celebrating,", lawyer and author Hal G. P. Colebatch -- in seeking to determine '"Where Have All the Poets Gone?" -- suggests that the "absence of patriotic poetry that is both popular and poetically accomplished in the present great clash of civilizations and cultures is odd."

Well, it would be odd but for one thing: the pustule-like eruption of the morally and spiritually diseased Cry Baby Boom elite in the 1960's and the war these sick weirdos declared on a once decent society. The post-war vipers born of what Tom Brokaw famously called "the greatest generation" have utterly abandoned the honor and courage held in such high esteem by their heroic parents. As for respecting tradition and heritage, the Cry Baby Boom elite (aka the Counterculture elite) gleefully heaped scorn and contumely on their noble heritage of virtue, self-sacrifice, patriotism, compassion and heroism.

And just listen to the strident, whiny, thumpy, twangy offal they call "MUSIC."

Their knowledge of the classics such as geometry is every bit as pitiful: what they mistakenly insist on calling ROCK and ROLL is in reality a largely unpredictable series of spastic, lurching displacements about their PITCH and YAW axes. Whatever it is, it is NOT dance.

They have abandoned cognition and enshrined in its place emotion. No wonder the wilting flower children continue to cling to their precious mantra, if it feeeeeeeeeeeels good, do it. No wonder they rise in unaccustomed vigor to defend what they INSIST is their "right" to smoke, snort, inject or swallow dope to escape a real world they have voluntarily disqualified themselves to deal with.

Some might argue it would be impossible to euthanize these pitiful smudges of dysfunctional protoplasm because they have never dared to LIVE in the first place. They occupy their present lofty status in the food chain ONLY by accident of birth. They are offer up convincing evidence that -- as Ann Coulter asserted in "Godless" -- Darwin was wrong in postulating survival of the fittest.

And finally there is not a shred of poetry to be found in the rancid ranks of these morally stunted, anti-intellectual runts of the Cry Baby Boom elite for one and only one reason: Poetry depends upon the existence of a soul -- these absurd little ego-inflated whoopie cushions masquerading as human beings don't qualify.
-- Thomas E. Stuart
Kapa'au, Hawaii

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