The American Spectator

Reader Mail

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

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":

p> em>The towns that strove for Homer dead br> To build him a memorial br> were those where Homer begged his bread.

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