RSS
Home
Cops (Along with Bejamin Franklin, Plato, and Socrates) Hate Poetry
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Cops (along with Benjamin Franklin, Plato and Socrates) Hate Poetry
“Cops Hate Poetry” was an underground/indy publication that the former Charles Bernstein (now Sid Yiddish) used to publish/put out. Apparently Benjamin Franklin (he can go fly a kite) and Plato also had their reservations about verse (You could say they were ADVERSE to poetry.).
As I was rereading “The Autobiography” by Benjamin Franklin, I was reminded of Franklin’s shockingly condescending view towards poetry. Apparently, he associated it with effeminate artifice or European dandyism, and he even referred to an associate who wrote verse (James Ralph) as a “pretty poet.”
He only saw it as a good way to beginning word learning tool (something akin to a modern Dora or Dr. Seuss books) and nothing more. He made his feelings clear when he wrote “I aproprov’d the amusing oneself with Poetry now and then as far as to improve one’s language, but no further.”
Franklin disparages Ralph and his pursuit of poetry (which Franklin talks about as it were a disease) a few pages later when he writes: “The Transaction fix’d Ralph in his Resolution of becoming a poet. I did all I could to dissuade him from it, but he continued scribbling Verses, till Pope cured him.”
James Ralph who later became a political writer (an infinitely more economically rewarding career path) and the reason why he quit pursuing poetry is that Alexander Pope (Ralph had earlier defended some writers that Pope attacked) wrote the following about him for later editions of the Dunciad.
Silence, ye Wolves! While Ralph to Cynthia howls.
And makes night hideous-Answer him ye owls.
Plato also expressed a dislike of poetry in his writings, but it didn’t mean exactly the same thing that it means today. Plato thought poets were primarily concerned with form surface, and spectacle while philosophers were more focused on meaning. To some extent this polarizing view persists today, but what do you do with Nietzsche and Sartre or Wallace Stevens who were concerned with both?
In “The Republic,” Plato acknowledges, “There is an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry.” He mentions a poet who called a philosopher who quarreled with him a “yelping bitch shrieking at her master.”
He later goes after Homer insisting that his influence is greater than his importance, He writes : “praisers of Homer who say that this poet educated Greece, and that in the management and education of human affairs it is worthwhile to take him up for study and for living, by arranging one's whole life according to this poet” (606e1-5). Plato agrees that Homer is indeed the educator of Greece, and immediately adds that Homer is “the most poetic and first of the tragic poets.”
Modern scholars generally believe that Plato was thinking of poetry as oral, public performances of verse (which was a form of popular culture) rather than written down poetry in its modern academics definition.
But nonetheless, Plato (and Socrates whose ideas Plato voiced) the only poetry that he would allow in the ideal state was “hymns to the gods and praises to famous men." He believed that other poetry was of service to neither truth nor the State.
Insert photo caption or credit here
Related Articles:
Comments
2010 Valentine Guide
Single, married or something in between? Find what you need for Valentine's Day.
Single, married or something in between? Find what you need for Valentine's Day.
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE …
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE …
