The American Spectator

Reader Mail

An Inspired Profession

1.30.07 @ 12:01AM

THREE MEALS AND A BED
Re: Letters (under "Tennyson, Anyone?") in Reader Mail's Patriotic Poets Society and Hal G.P. Colebatch's Where Have All the Poets Gone?:

My article on poetry produced some very interesting responses, and I feel a couple of them are worth comment. One stated:

"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."

The point is well-taken that patriotic or conservative poets would face the hostility of the establishment by being abused, denied a soft life of tenure on some leafy campus or simply ignored in the journals and reviews. Yet equivalent disadvantages did not stop many of the great poets of the past, conservative or otherwise, who made their livings in all sorts of ways, and when there was no social security. As the Australian poet A.D. Hope wrote, in "Conversation with Calliope":

The towns that strove for Homer dead
To build him a memorial
were those where Homer begged his bread.
There never was an age at all,
Gave poets three meals and a bed ...

Goethe was a professor-administrator, Villon a pick-pocket, Whitman a loafer, Chaucer a civil servant, T.S. Eliot a banker and company director. Kipling spent his first seven working years as a reporter on a small Indian newspaper (where the type-setter praised his poems as "very good, Sahib," when they neatly filled a blank space at the bottom of a column). There is life for poets beyond a college campus. One of Australia's major lyric poets, John Shaw Nielson, was a farm-laborer and road-mender, and half-blind to boot, while the bush balladist Banjo Paterson, author of "The Man from Snowy River," was a Sydney lawyer.

Today the "basics of food, shelter and water" are not hard for a person with brains to find, and a good poet has to have brains anyway. On the other hand, I know of very few if any major poets who emerged from, or even survive immersion in, the easy, cosseted life of university creative writing schools and departments. Poets, like other creative artists, should not expect the way will be easy. J. K. Rowling, not exactly a poet, but a considerable creative artist, wrote the first Harry Potter stories in cheap Edinburgh cafes, existing on a supporting parent's pension and trying to keep out of the cold. Eric Hoffer, a considerable American philosopher and intellectual in the better sense, worked as a longshoreman, and there are many other examples. Conservatives, of all people, should not be ashamed of getting jobs in the real world. Yes, they would often be abused, conspired against and/or ignored by the left cultural establishment, but genuine quality has a way of very often coming out despite this.

I do agree that some moral, emotional and other support for poets is necessary if they are to succeed, as are publishing opportunities and mechanisms (which self-publishing on the Internet etc. lacks) for quality-control. I appreciate the poems which some readers have sent in, but it cannot be said that they are widely known -- which illustrates another aspect of the problem. (Well, I guess they are a bit better known now!)

What we are looking at, perhaps, is a whole systemic failure of cultural conservatism, and in other arts as well as poetry. This is much worse, I think, in countries like Britain and Canada than in the U.S., but is a problem everywhere. There is no reason conservatives should not be artists in the widest sense. Obviously the government/university has supplanted the private patron. The poet of the past who wrote to please a private patron had to at least please someone. The poet who writes to gain a government grant or "creative writing" chair now only has to have the favor of his or her own cronies (or "peer group") sitting on some committee (and those on both sides of the table know their positions could be reversed next time round). Remedying this is not simple, but one thing needed is private patrons of intelligence, taste and discrimination. Who knows what might happen if some conservative philanthropist or culture-warrior with good literary taste, imagination, intelligence and adequate capital, set up a good-quality conservative poetry magazine?

Another problem I have identified from the Internet is that poetry is being taught very badly at schools.

Thomas E. Stuart's letter is certainly eloquent, and echoes thoughts I and certainly many others have had from time to time. Yet I think it is really overly pessimistic. Look at the huge successes of The Lord of The Rings, the Narnia stories, even Star Wars and Harry Potter, as well as countless other works (including, as another correspondent pointed out, a lot of country music). It is still stories of patriotism, heroism and the celebration of traditional values that are the most successful, and for which there is a huge appetite. I guess that is another way of saying that our societies are still full of decent people. But is some ways they lack a voice and an inspiration.
-- Hal G. P. Colebatch
Nedlands, Western Australia

ASK NOT
Re: Philip Klein's The Candidate:

"The best way we remain safe and we retain our freedom... is remaining on offense, remaining strong and not becoming weak in a time of pressure." As memorable sayings go, it's not exactly "Give me liberty or give me death!" but it'll do. Why will conservatives et al. support Rudy? He loves the country. Hillary? Well, it goes something like this; Rudy loves the country for what it has done for him, Hillary loves the country for what it can do for her! And, that's not exactly JFK, but you get the drift.
-- Mike Showalter
Austin, Texas

WHAT THE DOCTOR ORDERED
Re: David Hogberg's Better Late Than Never:

I certainly agree with Mr. Hogberg's view of Bush's tax reform on health insurance. I am a practicing physician. I just dropped my employer-provided healthcare. I had an employer-provided policy with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, covering myself (age 57), my wife (age 60), and son (age 22, in grad school). My monthly premium for healthcare was $1427.46. My employer covered $375.00 of that premium. That left $1052.46 that I paid monthly (withheld from my paycheck) with no tax benefit at all. My employer would benefit to the extent that the $375.00 was tax-free to the employer, although my employer is a non-profit organization, and I am not sure of their tax status regarding this. I am in a 28 percent tax bracket, so I would have to earn close to $180,000 a year to pay the $12,629.52 yearly premiums. I just cancelled my employer-provided policy and obtained a Health Savings Account policy, on my own, for which I pay $507 monthly premium ($6,084 post tax dollars, or about $8,500 pre-tax dollars) for a $5,000 deductible health plan, and am allowed to put $6,450 yearly tax free in a health savings account, with a tax savings of $1,806 per year, making my net savings with all tax consequences included about $5,000 a year. In addition, I keep whatever portion of the $6,450 I put in my savings account, plus accrued value. Thus I may benefit by up to about $1,145 a year. You can bet I'll be thinking hard about every healthcare dollar I spend. As a physician, I have an advantage. I won't be going in for an MRI to assess my benign positional vertigo, for example, which my patients often demand, because I know it's self-limited, and not a brain tumor. Interestingly, I asked my employer to continue to provide the $375 a month that was being paid on my traditional policy, but my employer adamantly refused. It was my employer's way or the highway. I took the highway. Perhaps more risk, but also greater potential financial benefit. I will not be ruined financially, as my costs are capped by the deductible.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Taxes, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Social Security, Law, Iraq, NATO, Conservatism, Immigration, Medicare