No, not the authoritarian political system that killed millions across the 20th century. I mean the cheesy poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox that we discussed in my American Literature I class (linked here).
We were talking about good and bad poetry, and while most of us ganged up on the poem (including me), a few people defended it.
My defense is posted as a reply to this, so it doesn’t take up so much space on the front page.
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I’ll grant that, compared to “Song of Myself” or Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose,” “Communism” isn’t great poetry—and that some of the ideas—using a very real, earnest political struggle for justice and equality as a metaphor of being horny—is ethically obtuse. But I’d also like to toss out the idea that a culture that can’t take pleasure in “Communism” is a culture in which poetry is dead or dying. Wilcox wrote in the late 1800s, and was wildly popular. In fact, she wrote at the only period in history when published poetry had a really wide audience. When modernism rolled around, it very consciously rejected popular middle-brow poets such as Wilcox and Longfellow, in favor of the difficulties of Eliot, Pound, Rukeyser and such. At the same time, poetry started its long decline. Today, it’s a niche art. There are hundreds—maybe thousands—of talented poets writing in America today, but they have no audience. There are many reasons for that, but one seems to be that most poets (and professors of poetry) rejects the very idea of poetry as entertainment. Compare this to music or film, two thriving art forms, which run the gamut from popular to the avant-garde. In both of these arts forms, the popular and avant-garde (I know, I know, that’s a crude dichotomy, but this is a blog, not a journal article) feed off of and contribute to each other. In the world of poetry today, you don’t have that interplay, and poetry is arguable the worse for it.
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