Quote:
Originally posted by Joseph Bottum:
An interesting discussion might be on the fact that the default position of poetry is rejection of politics, the political life, and political ambition: Bene vixit, bene qui latuit, as Ovid would have it. Not all of them reject for as philosophically developed reasons as Lucretius, but I'd be willing to bet that poets in the western tradition generally start from the position that politics is bad, wasteful, and unworthy of an adult's ambition.
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Jody,
I disagree that the rejection of politics is the default position of poetry, but I look at "politics" in the broad, Marxist sense (i.e., power relations). I think that in some traditions politics is inescapable, for instance, in the case of someone like Milosz or Zagajewski.
To quote Deleuze and Guattari from their book
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature:
"The second characteristic of minor literatures [i.e., a literature contructed by a minority out of a major language] is that everything in them is political. In major literatures, in contrast, the individual concern (familial, marital, and so on) joins with other no less individual concerns, the social milieu serving as a mere environment or a background; this is so much the case that none of these Oedipal intrigues are specifically indispensable or absolutely necessary but all become as one in a large space. Minor literature is completely different; its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics..."
I do note you qualify later on in the paragraph, "in the western tradition." But even that is debatable, if I consider, say, poets of the Harlem Renaissance or even Milosz as part of the Western tradition.
Cheers
Jodie