This is from an exchange on the distinguished TS Eliot website between an anonymous author and myself— representing Scarriet. (Earlier posts are at the bottom if you wish to follow the conversation from the start, which begins with a post including the opening passage from “A Talk on Dante by T.S. Eliot.)A peculiar thing happens at one point—the anonymous author (unknown to me, AI?) quotes a Delmore Schwartz essay—my own (!) which I failed to recognize as my child, even as I found eerily familiara brief passage concerning Keats and money.
Replying to Anonymous participant:
There’s some confusion here. I didn’t say you believed Ransom didn’t believe in art for art’s sake. My position is: Ransom did not believe in art for art’s sake. And you think he did. In his essay, Ransom does quote “Sea Clouds” by Wallace Stevens as an example of pure aestheticism practiced by the “specialized” modern poet. Impressionism is the end of the line, the final step in the great evolution of poetry in secular, late capitalism’s division-of-labor. This is what Ransom seems to be saying. Modernists pride themselves on being the final evolutionary phase—until they finally realize it does no good to be the “end” of something because it cuts off the branch they are standing on. They can’t be “new” if they are the “end.” The simplistic rhetoric of Modernism needed to be re-written constantly because none of them really knew what they were saying. No one had really thought it through. The Modernists were ‘bad poets yet red hot revolutionaries’ equipped with a flimsy manifesto that changed every other year. Their poetry didn’t speak for them. They had to constantly explain what it was doing. They had to jump up and down and put muddy footprints on Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley and Poe and claim Villon and Donne were the “real thing.” Ransom was a bit smarter than this. He could laugh at the Marxists rebuking Shakespeare. Ransom had enough literacy that he wasn’t merely an art for art’s sake modernist. Ransom didn’t fit the silly Modernist mold. He was too smart. His defense of Shakespeare against the Marxists is not an “art for art’s sake” argument. His own poetry was not impressionistic, sea clouds, art for art’s sake, poetry. Like the rest of the Moderns, he really didn’t make a lasting impression (not like Shakespeare or Shelley or Poe) and the best of his lyrics sound, in the end, Victorian. Writers of the 20th century like Ransom, Delmore, Old Possum, did some nice things. But Modernism itself was basically a fraud, a wading pool -ism for second and third rate scholars to splash about in.
Ransom was analyzing Modernism in a far-reaching manner; his wasn’t a subjective opinion that poetry ought to concern itself with aesthetics only. Ransom didn’t believe in “art for art’s sake,” as you say. He says the old poets served us lemonade: lemon, the moral; sugar, the beauty. In the factory of modern life, division-of-labor demands poets perfect the sugar and leave the lemon to someone else. But then Ransom plays a neat trick. Salt, he says, like lemonade, is also a compound—but NA and CL vanish in the salt we taste and enjoy, unlike lemonade, where tart and sweet both remain to our taste. Elements disappearing completely in a compound is more sophisticated. Poe used this chemical metaphor in describing poetry—later stolen by Eliot in his attempt to describe emotion’s exit in poetry Eliot preferred—the neutral catalyst in a chemical reaction is how Eliot explained it—the emotion is felt, influences the poem, but is not “in” the poem. Or, the reverse can be true: the emotion is felt by the reader, but it never existed in the poet. Chemistry itself is the ruling critical idea. A simple compound like lemonade is replaced by a more sophisticated one (yet found commonly in nature!): NaCl, sodium chloride, table salt. Ransom gave the example of old religious poetry: in the present day, the local minister of our local church handles “religion” for us, not the bards. Ransom’s whole aesthetic reasoning hinges on a sophisticated analysis of historically evolving labor practices (influenced by Marx, obviously). The conservative Southerner Ransom as a Marxist? Well, sure. Ransom didn’t write free verse. He was a brilliant critic who defends Modernism in his essays, but his own poetry rhymes and moralizes (lemonade!) like a Marxist dictator who preaches “share the wealth” but lives in a mansion on a hill. Modernism is a fraud precisely for this reason—its whole existence is theft and its best spokesmen (Ransom and Eliot) were too smart for Modernism—yet wore Modernism’s clothes to be accepted, lived in its shell like ambitious crabs. Minds like Poe, Ransom, and Eliot explode the flimsy platitudes of Romanticism v Modernism. Poetry doesn’t belong to weak, “historical,” scholarly, weavers. It burns with the ingenious chemistry of the individual. Eliot excoriated Poe—while secretly stealing from him. Baudelaire was the French version of Poe, more French, and therefore more “cool,” even as Baudelaire and Eliot were, in truth, nothing without Poe.
—Thomas Brady/Scarriet Editors/Thomas Graves
John Crowe Ransom argues Modern poets abandon social responsibility for “pure aesthetic effect”. Baudelaire advocates for artifice and beauty over nature, influencing Modernism. Ransom critiques traditional poetry’s moralizing, praising Modern poets’ autonomy.
The “pure aesthetic effect” refers to art (in this case, poetry) existing solely for its own sake, without serving moral, social, or practical purposes. Ransom argues Modern poets pursue this “purity” by separating aesthetics from morality, creating art that’s autonomous and self-contained.
For Ransom, poetry is an autonomous art form pursuing a “pure aesthetic effect”. He sees traditional poetry as often serving moral or social purposes, whereas Modern poetry seeks to separate aesthetics from morality, focusing on its own internal beauty and structure. Poetry’s goal is no longer to “make virtue delicious” but to achieve artistic purity.
Traditional poetry’s moralizing refers to poetry serving moral or didactic purposes, like promoting virtue or patriotism. Ransom critiques this approach, praising Modern poets for seeking autonomy and focusing on aesthetic beauty rather than moral instruction. Modern poets, in Ransom’s view, prioritize “art for art’s sake” over conveying moral messages.
II
A summary of the article “Porphyro’s Rose: Keats and T.S. Eliot’s “The Metaphysical Poets”” by Christopher Baker:
Christopher Baker is exploring a quiet connection between John Keats and T.S. Eliot, two poets who are usually seen as opposites. Eliot famously criticized the Romantic poets (like Keats), yet Baker argues that Eliot secretly borrowed one of Keats’s most powerful images to explain his own critical idea about poetry. That image is “Porphyro’s rose” from Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes.”
Early in his career, T.S. Eliot openly attacked Romantic poetry, calling poets like Keats emotionally immature. He believed poetry after the 17th century had lost something essential: a unity of thought and feeling. Eliot called this loss the “dissociation of sensibility.”
In simple terms, he thought modern poets either: thought too much without feeling, or felt too much without thinking. He admired the Metaphysical poets (like John Donne) because, in his view, they could think and feel at the same time.
In Eliot’s famous essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” he says that great poets “feel their thought as immediately as the odor of a rose.” Baker’s insight is this: That image of a rose may come directly from Keats.
In “The Eve of St. Agnes,” Keats writes: “Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose.”
Here’s why this matters: Porphyro doesn’t slowly reason his plan: His thought arrives all at once, with emotion and physical sensation. His mind and body react together: flushed brow, racing heart. This is exactly what Eliot later describes as unified sensibility.
So although Eliot criticized Keats, Keats had already written the very kind of poetic moment Eliot praised. Baker suggests that Eliot: Needed a clear image to explain his idea. Found one already perfected by Keats. Used it without openly crediting him. This fits Eliot’s own famous line that: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” Eliot may have been “stealing” respectfully.
The essay shows that Eliot’s relationship with Romanticism was more complicated than his attacks suggest. Over time: Eliot admitted he had been too harsh on Keats. He later called Keats “a great poet”. He praised Keats’s letters as intellectually profound.
Baker argues that Eliot’s critique of Romanticism was partly strategic—a way to push readers toward modern poetry—rather than a total rejection.
Keats and Eliot actually shared core beliefs: Poetry should unite thought and feeling. Meaning should be embodied in physical images. Poetry should create new wholes from mixed experience. Imagination reconciles opposites.
Baker’s essay argues that T.S. Eliot’s idea of “unified sensibility” may owe more to John Keats than Eliot ever publicly admitted — and that Porphyro’s rose quietly blooms at the heart of Eliot’s modernist criticism.
—Anonymous participant
John Crowe Ransom’s essay “Poets Without Laurels” says modernity’s division-of-labor landscape of a highly specialized work force naturally pushes poetry into niche obscurity. Attending a Rogers and Hammerstein musical, we do not really recognize that as poetry—it belongs to a more specialized category and whatever now occupies the category “poetry” for modern readers is not allowed to sound like Keats, Tennyson, or Lorenz Hart. When any art is defined by what it isn’t (“we can’t write like Byron anymore,” says Ransom in this same essay—it “dates” the poet who tries) it won’t be long before we don’t know what that art is. The original should always be sought, but absolute originality is impossible—we MUST be influenced by the past. If we stop trying to write poetry, which, to the amazement of everyone, is the Modernist agenda, we escape the past, we are 100% original, but we are essentially like an astronaut lost in space, a terrible situation which poets like Delmore Schwartz felt acutely. Ironically, the prison of Modernist poetry has the poet thinking of all kinds of ways to escape that prison and we can see how Schwartz tortured himself in this manner: I’ll use Freud! I’ll use Marx! I’ll use my estrangement from “modern” society!” The subjects multiply in a kind of desperation as poetry—what the public had always understood as poetry—loses the air (and every delicious odor) from the past. The poet shouldn’t panic, however. Schwartz did, because he belonged, yet did not belong, to the flesh and blood Modernist cabal in mid-century New York. A sorry fate. Almost as bad as it would have been for Keats, had he been born into a fortune.
—Thomas Graves
The article “Delmore Schwartz and the Modern Complaint” discusses Schwartz’s critique of modern poetry, particularly T.S. Eliot’s ideas. Schwartz argues that modern poetry’s obscurity stems from poets feeling isolated from society, which values materialism (e.g., banks, insurance) over poetry. He disagrees with Eliot’s notion that modern life’s complexity necessitates complex poetry, saying this oversimplifies the issue. Schwartz believes poetry should connect with society, but modern life’s focus on non-poetic aspects isolates poets. The author critiques Schwartz’s arguments, suggesting he’s projecting self-pity onto modern poetry’s challenges.
What Eliot says is prima facie false. How could poetry be “regarded hitherto as the impossible” for poets who had hitherto not lived in “an industrial city in America.” It is a truism to say new industrial landscapes will become topics of new poems. Well of course! The cabal of “Modernists” prided themselves on what was dull and inevitable. You still need to be a good poet, no matter what hill, street corner, or exotic locale you use.
—Thomas Graves
T.S. Eliot said that “I learned that the sort of material that I had, the sort of experience that an adolescent had had, in an industrial city in America, could be the material for poetry; and that the source of new poetry might be found in what had been regarded hitherto as the impossible, the sterile, the intractably 𝐮𝐧𝐩𝐨𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐜”.
From Baudelaire, Eliot learned that modern city life—even its ugly, dirty, and depressing parts—could be poetry. Things like crowds, decay, boredom, and moral darkness were usually considered unfit for poetry, but Baudelaire showed that these could be powerful poetic material. He also showed that poetry could mix realistic details with dreamlike or ghostly elements, placing the ordinary next to the strange or fantastic.
—Anonymous participant
This is a Modernist trope: poetry using “unpoetic sources.” This flies in the face of what Poe said in his “Philosophy of Composition,” where he says the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic there is. Poe was more scientific than the Modernists. In this instance, it might seem to us that Poe is too narrow in his assertion. But Poe is correct and the Modernist is wrong. There is a poetic scale, obviously. One can argue about the most “poetical topic,” of course, but the awareness of a scale and the argument is scientific and a good thing. Merely lowering the public’s taste in order to produce poetry from “unpoetic sources” is nothing but bufoonery. Baudelaire wrote fine poetry based on the lurid and the exotic, and there is a “street sublimity” of which all are familiar. Poe helped expand poetic sensibility by introducing the Gothic, the cinematic, the frightening, prior to Baudelaire. But this isn’t quite the same thing as merely using “unpoetic sources.” Art still requires art. Eliot using 20th century war to replicate Dante’s Inferno is actually a hackneyed idea. The Modernists pursued the notion that “modern life” was a kind of hell, but Delmore Schwartz called out Eliot on this point. Eliot said poetry must be “difficult” because “modern life” was “difficult.” But this is actually ahistorical and specious, typical of Modernist thinking. Schwartz asked simply, “Why?” Why does poetry need to be “difficult?” Because working at Lloyd’s was “difficult?” Because it is “difficult” for Eliot to read Dante? A close examination will reveal the shallowness, the easy assumptions, the mopey self-pity, of the Modernist experiment. Eliot wrote some lovely lyrics, but 100 years on, they look more and more Victorian than “modern”—whatever that loaded term is ultimately supposed to mean.
—Thomas Graves
I agree with you when you state that “T.S. was great at explaining things.” His long introduction, in which he admits his ignorance of Dante in a manner that nonetheless remains charming, demonstrates this clearly.
T.S. Eliot’s “A Talk on Dante” begins with his explanation that he will speak informally about Dante’s influence, rather than lecturing. He defends against potential egoism by framing this as modesty, given his non-expert status, and avoids quoting Dante in Italian out of respect.
Eliot reflects on his long engagement with Dante, starting forty years prior when he read Dante in prose translation and memorized passages. He has felt adequately prepared to discuss Dante for twenty years.
He then discusses the poet’s role in extracting poetry from seemingly “unpoetic” sources and acknowledges his debt to Baudelaire, referencing lines from “Les Fleurs du Mal”. Writing about a great poet is an act of gratitude, though his contribution is modest.
Eliot broadens the discussion to debts poets owe each other: those who suggest methods, those from whom lines are borrowed, and those who set standards for poetic virtue (Villon, Sappho). Appreciating great poets like Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, and Virgil is a lifetime task.
Eliot discusses borrowing lines from Dante to evoke scenes and relate the medieval Inferno to modern life, citing “The Waste Land”. He connects his intentions in “The Waste Land” to those in “Little Gidding,” which he intended to be a canto of the Inferno or Purgatorio, presenting a parallel, by contrast, between Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio and a hallucinated scene after an air raid. His method differed: he borrowed and adapted only a few phrases, because he was imitating Dante.
Eliot addresses the challenge of approximating Dante’s terza rima in English, noting English is less suited to rhyming than Italian. He adopted a simple alternation of unrhymed masculine and feminine terminations. He believes rhymed terza rima is less unsatisfactory for translations of the Divine Comedy than blank verse. He worries about the shifts and twists needed to fit Dante’s words into English rhyme, and no verse demands greater literalness in translation than Dante’s. He doesn’t know if his substitute for rhyme would be tolerable in a long original poem in English, but he knows he should not find enough time to write it.
—Anonymous participant
T.S. was great at explaining things (his long introduction, in which he admits ignorance of Dante in a way that manages to be charming shows this nicely) but he really was basically full of shit, as the whole “modernist” movement actually was. Whether Pound’s ridiculous Criticism (found in failed school textbooks written in middle age), Williams’ boring free verse, Eliot’s nasty assaults on Shelley and Poe, or Charles Olson’s silly “breath” theories, Modernism was merely an empty movement of the “new” which built nothing of substance, and spent most of its energy on damning great works of the past. Dante was amazing, but no one needed Eliot (who slighted Milton and didn’t know Italian) to tell them that.
—Thomas Graves
In “A Talk on Dante,” T.S. Eliot reflects on Dante’s profound influence on poetry and culture. Eliot begins by disclaiming expertise and setting a modest tone. He emphasizes that the true debt to Dante lies not in direct borrowings or adaptations, but in his shaping of thought, his view of life, and the philosophy and theology within the Divine Comedy. Eliot highlights two key lessons from Dante: first, that a poet should be the servant, not the master, of language; and second, Dante’s unparalleled width of emotional range, capturing the spectrum from depravity to beatific vision. He argues that Dante’s achievement lies in his ability to articulate the inarticulate, expanding the possibilities of language and perception for all. Eliot sees Dante as a uniquely “European” poet, transcending provincial boundaries and offering lessons applicable to poets in any language. He concludes by emphasizing the importance of craft, speech, and the exploration of sensibility, all of which are exemplified in Dante’s work.
“A Talk On Dante” by T.S. Eliot (first page as quoted by Anonymous participant)
“May I explain first why I have chosen, not to deliver a lecture about Dante, but to talk informally about his influence on myself? What might appear egotism, in doing this, I present as modesty; and the modesty which it pretends to be is merely prudence. I am in no way a Dante scholar; and my general knowledge of Italian is such, that on this occasion, out of respect to the audience and Dante himself, I shall refrain from quoting him in Italian. And I do not feel I have anything more to contribute, on the subject of Dante’s poetry, than I put, years ago, into a brief essay. As I explained in the original preface to that essay, I read Dante only with a prose translation beside the text. Forty years ago I began to puzzle out the Divine Comedy in this way; and when I thought I had grasped the meaning of the passage which especially delighted me, I committed it to memory; so that, for some years, I was able to recite a large part of one canto or another to myself, lying in bed or on a railway journey. Heaven knows what it would have sounded like, had I recited it aloud; but it was by this means that I steeped myself in Dante’s poetry. And now it is twenty years since I set down all that my meager attainments qualified me to say about Dante. But I thought it not uninteresting to myself, and possibly to others, to try to record in what my own debt to Dante consists. I do not think I can explain everything, even to myself; but as I still, after forty years, regard his poetry as the most persistent and deepest influence upon my own verse, I should like to establish at least some of the reason for it. Perhaps confessions by poets,” [here the page ends] -TS Eliot
Music is closer to poetry than poetry which has the bones and clothes of speech. Every poet goes willingly into eyes which are your eyes, silly. The actions of music no one can teach. Poets toil with words everyone uses. Words are nearly as infinite as muses. Muses are anyone who has anything to say. But notes are few--- a musician hears words and has no idea what to do except to dream in music's tiny room with a limited number of sounds. In their small, ghostly rounds a flattened third is gloom and returning to the root pure joy. Poetry drowns in its ocean of noisy words but music! Music borrows from hidden birds the poetry which has drowned itself. Words cannot be proof we are friends. In the forest of summer rest with me. Music is closer to poetry than poetry. I'll meet you where the intermezzo ends.
How much do I know about how much I loved? Can this come from one opinion? Can the answer come from only one? In what particular tone or form? More meaningful than the family dog passing my bed at night? More sad than harbingers of an ever deeper and darker December? More important than a friend who doesn't feel quite right and places an ad, a message that I can see which is full of pain and transcends poetry? Can it be counted up? Like money saved, with interest? Can one organize one's dreams to some purpose so that one is responsible for winning---only possible by teams against teams? How much is memory a factor? How much of my memory can possibly be revealed to me by someone else, and even if I pressed you, you, for instance, how much could I expect to get? The scene of your confession would need light, thoughtful music. Is it all set? We can do this, can't we? I promise to listen. I'll even provide the poetry. I promised this from the beginning, somehow. Speak slowly. Is this a good tempo? We're winging this, aren't we? Okay I'm listening now.
BONUS POEM: REVISED FROM DECEMBER 18, 2022
MOST POETS I KNOW
Most poets I know wouldn't dare
to make poetry without music, makeup and hair.
What poet leaves the house
after saying unkind things to their spouse
and drives in tears without knowing
what time it is or where they are going?
This poet wishes to inform you
if Berlin is in the poem you won't be fooled
with scenes from Munich. If I dine
with friends away from the rain along the Rhine,
it won't be me, alone in the poem, in Hamburg. Nein.
I need to be honest with you. If I'm too kind
to leave the wife and kids for the most exciting woman
in the world, and it's rained for two straight days, you'll know.
Kindness both is love and kills love. Rain
can be depicted in many different ways,
but this is no excuse. Influenced by other poets
is the sorriest excuse of all.
I know my poetry.
Don't give me that look.
You'll know right away I mean business.
You'll see every letter pertaining to my fall,
the medicine I was prescribed, how effective it was,
the story within the story: the duel, the battle, the ball,
the feelings I had at the time, or whether the sound engineer was in love.
The sports play of 2025 occurred in a Baltimore Ravens/Pittsburgh Steelers NFL game recently, an important game with AFC playoff implications.
A TD by the Ravens to give them a lead late in a game against Aaron Rodgers (40-something, former Jeopardy! host, and QB for Pittsburgh) was overturned by an “official review” which turned out to be an “official” misreading of the rules, so that millions of football fans now think it is necessary for a receiver to take three steps while holding onto the football in the endzone to score a touchdown (6 points) for his team.
The coach of the Ravens announced in the press conference after the game that he didn’t understand the ruling, but he was confident the “experts” got it right. He succumbed, in other words. John Harbaugh, who is white, simply assumed his receiver, Isaiah Likely, who is black, did not do what was necessary to make the catch.
The NFL overturned Likely’s important catch and every commentator in favor gave the reason that Likely didn’t complete three steps with the ball.
But three steps has never been necessary for a pass completion and the specific NFL rule pointed to in this instance does not say three steps are necessary.
Football fans and football officials cannot read.
Is this a surprise?
You don’t need three steps.
Part B of the “catch” rule says “2 feet down,” not “2 steps.”
Everyone agrees Isaiah Likely got two feet down.
Amazingly, no one, it seems, was able to clearly read Part C.
Not the Ravens head coach.
No one.
The misreading of Part C caused a misreading of Part B. Fans mistakenly assumed “steps” were mentioned in Part B. But only “feet” are.
The false NFL decision was justified in the following manner:
It was “mistakenly” said Likely needed to “take a third step” with the ball (Likely was stepping during the catch, not falling).
Part C, which addresses the “completion of the catch,” does say “additional step.”
First, it should be mentioned that the whole idea of “completion of the catch” is, in itself, problematic. It creates ambiguity where there ought to be none. A player catches the ball. Why should there even be such a thing as the “completion of the catch?” It allows lawyers in the door. It allows the NFL to examine what is separate from “the catch” for the sole purpose that a “catch” might be overturned. Rules are rules. But why are they made? That’s more important.
You caught the ball—but now you need to “complete” it—what?
Part C is where the error of the “three steps” originates.
Likely got two feet down—the third step is not necessary for the “catch.”
“Additional step” in Part C is given as one of several options for “completing the catch,” and two of those qualifying “moves” are: “avoiding the defender” and “extending the ball,” both of which Likely did—as he took his two steps.
But here one can see how the nonsensical nature of “completing the catch” is guaranteed to provoke confusion.
Can Likely “complete” his catch during his catch or does he need to wait to complete it after his catch? It forces a player to catch the ball—and then catch the ball. The whole rule is absurd.
One can see how a mind determined to second-guess a “catch,” can, and will.
In this instance, the defender was behind Likely and Likely was running away from the defender and holding the ball stretched out in front of him so as to keep the ball away from the defender, who was trying his best to knock the ball away as Likely was running from him while taking the necessary two steps (getting “both feet down” necessary for a “catch” in Part B of the rule) while the ball was fully in Likely’s grasp.
The play was called a TD by the officials on the field and the video shows Likely 1) avoiding the defender 2) with the ball secure in his grasp 3) during the time in which he takes two full steps, and is in the act of taking the third step when the ball comes loose.
In both the spirit AND the letter of the law, it is 100% a TD—if one reads the whole rule carefully.
It was called as such by the officials on the field.
It was over-turned by anonymous reviewers watching it from somewhere else.
It is NOT a TD for one reason only.
The NFL is an autocratic organization which can get any result it wants. This is not sports. It is something else. It is like the weaponization of lawfare in politics—the exact same thing. The fussy and complicated rules of the NFL (a “completion” of a catch after the…”catch”) are part of that autocratic behavior.
Football fans know NFL rules are fussy and complicated. Was that a catch? When exactly did the ball come “loose?” Did the turf compromise the catch? Did a tiny movement of the ball in the receiver’s hands indicate the receiver did not have “control” of the ball, even though in the eyes of the whole world, he “caught it?” Fans know that a ball deemed “loose” (even slightly) though “caught,” can, and has, overturned a “catch.”
It does not take a brain surgeon to understand why the NFL prefers their rules to be so complex they defy even microscopic, never mind ordinary, perception. Unseen judges—not the accidents or struggles or eyes of visible officials on the field—can have the final say.
Isaiah Likely, on behalf of all Americans, we are sorry.
Great catch!
***********
Someone on FB this morning asked this question: Can poems change lives? and the responses included “Dear White America” by Danez Smith, Patricia Smith, Lucille Clifton, Obama, Walt Whitman, and Sylvia Plath.
Here’s what I wrote:
Individual poems can change a life, but it becomes increasingly difficult for that to happen when poetry which supports poems is destroyed, which happens gradually and is undetected by individual experiences. Poetry fell in the late 19th century/early 20th Century period (‘Modernism’) when the world went mad—imperial France and Britain almost took over the world, history painting was replaced by ‘primitive art’— advantageously celebrated by Empire. The gradual destruction is undetected and poetry’s importance is lost and misunderstood—when art declines, education declines, when education declines, journalism declines, and finally the decline itself can no longer recognize anything good, except vaguely and abstractly, and all “knowledge” becomes the property of a Jeopardy! champion or professors who channel narrow and bitter politics.
By someone's groan is my pleasure known. Virtue despairs that I can see flesh as easily as poetry--- the same flesh virtue would hide.
Virtue saw nothing. But virtue lied. What is virtue, then? It is whatever keeps flesh from men, as the innocent dodges the dart, again.
Virtue is prevention. Eventually its death allows breath to breathe into another's breath. New flesh made allows us to see the end of our polite and laborious poetry.
The same poetry which fashioned marriage into a slippery mirage. Wasn't the child always the image in the artist's mind who was your worst enemy the moment he was intimate and kind?
She cannot stand to think I imagine things about her morally, but with a lusty wink.
I place poems about her visibly, in every public square. The crowd loves these poems. They stare at my creations. My pleasure known is what I know of her. "Of her?" No. Her.
It isn't simply "about" her. The true God is incarnated. The true poet is the one who waited.
In despair, she goes out of her mind. She hates and loves both the loving and the hating kind.
She hates the men who are fathers, unless they turn to her saying, beneath their breath, "yes..."
Minds are costumes of the media/education complex. Once free-thinking, society is haunted and blind. Especially frightening to me: They congratulate themselves that their costume has a mind. Propaganda is worse than we thought. Propaganda is a propaganda machine of the mind, self-creating itself with the slightest prompts. Circus masters never dreamed they could make circuses like this, afflicting every village and valley ("hey you got a cigarette?") with snow, fog and mist of iron derangement---facts are infected with facts that say all night what they said all day. Society roars towards the mask. Question, question, question. That's all I ask.
Shall we live on Mars under a dome? We might mine the moon's minerals. The earth will always be our home. The satellite drifting by brings us a sentimental movie, an old story which makes us cry, a family saga fitting to the eye. We are only curators now, preserving what our ancestors did, playing Beethoven note for note, painting the eagle on the Custom House, keeping the USS Constitution afloat. What else are we supposed to do? Garden, watch sports, 24/7? There isn't room for anything new. Turn our music up to eleven? Build a second Los Angeles in Vermont? A metropolis is hard work. Cities have eye sores. That's not what we really want. We want sex. And small pores. There are two political parties in the U.S. Government--- One party seeks morality and tremendous wealth. The other: the least weirdo be weird and content. I'm a conservative. I believe in engineering beauty and taste, like our best ancestors did. I write poetry which hints of God. Fuck all the rest. But today I think the others have a point--- the party of limits, the party of the weirdo. Nostalgic custodians! Where can we go?
Scarriet 