By Gary Corseri
My "bridge over
troubled water" is Literature and the Arts. But, these days, with the exception
of a few cherished authors and websites, I am apt to get more sustenance from
re-reading the Classics--even 20th Century Classics--than from
reading the frothy outpourings of identity-poets and lauded, establishmentarian
shills. A much-thumbed Vintage Book is one I've held dear since my 20s, by a
poet I've introduced to university students surfeited on too much Frost in high
school and too much Yeats and Eliot beyond that.
Now, that trio
did write some great works, of course, but not one of them had much to say
about American politics. And when they are taught in our public and private
institutions, their politics--personal or literary--are studiously avoided. And
there's the rub! Because, if we are ever to grasp our fleeting Zeitgeist, we need the whole round
picture--politics, the Arts, slang, sexuality, food--the whole cascading shebang!
The American
poet who best provides that, for his time and ours, is Robinson Jeffers, who
died one year before JFK was killed, but at 75, had lived to see terrible
presentiments:
"While this
America settles in the mould of its vulgarity,
Heavily
thickening to empire,
And protest,
only a bubble in the molten mass, pops
And sighs out,
and the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling
remember that the flower fades to make
fruit, the fruit
rots to make earth.
Out of the
mother; and through the spring exultances,
ripeness and
decadence; and home to the mother."
Thus, the first 2 stanzas of what may be his
best-known poem, 1925's "Shine, Perishing Republic." In five quatrains, Jeffers
plays Laocoon to the fast-food, quick-to-the-draw Empire the Republic would
become--"You making haste haste on decay"--sounding his alarm while fortifying
his moral stance:
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