Jodie--
My observation wasn't about the banning or paucity of poetry on politics. It was, rather, that whatever such work exists usually takes as its theme the unworthiness of political life.
I don't want to subsume this under the category of "rarely treated topics in poetry." If there is, in fact, little poetry on the political life, that's not the same thing as there being little poetry on the work of a CEO. The Aristotelian account of the virtues--which is to say, the dominant account of human psychology in the western philosophical tradition--begins with the proposition that man is by nature a political animal. And if little poetry exists on the political life--the life lived in the polis, matching oneself in public scrutiny against other people--then we have a huge hole in the range of human life covered by poetry.
As it happens, I'm not sure that we lack much poetry about politics. Certainly the Greeks thought of the Iliad as containing a great deal of politics, and readers of Virgil have seen the political elements, in both the broad and narrow senses of the word "politics." Dante is full of assumptions about the necessity of people of character to enter the political realm.
But--or so, at least, I claimed in my earlier post--the general poetic treatment of this has been that political ambition is unworthy of our time: Fame, as Milton has it, is the "last infirmity of noble mind"--meaning, as I take it, that you have to have a certain nobility to imagine venturing yourself in the public arena, but you ought not to: it is, at last, an infirmity of mind and character.
Jody
[This message has been edited by Joseph Bottum (edited November 07, 2004).]
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