Thinking about Thinking by Margaret Randall

Author:Margaret Randall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Casa Urraca, Ltd.
Published: 2021-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

Was Shakespeare

a Political Poet?

I’ve never heard it said of Shakespeare that he was a political poet or wrote protest theater. It was simply appreciated in his day, as it continues to be in ours, that the great bard had a talent for creating characters, presenting situations, and telling stories that reflect life’s central dilemmas and joys: love, fear, death, jealousy, taboos, and the struggle to be true to one’s beliefs. And that he exercised those skills marvelously. His vast output, mastery of the language, and skill in taking on the issues of the day—which turn out to be the issues of all days—make his work enduring.

In most parts of the world, good writing that movingly depicts the battles we have with others and ourselves is considered psychologically profound, a useful map helping listeners and readers to contemplate our lives, draw on the experiences of others, and sensitize ourselves to emotions not always expressed in mundane daily discourse. But in the United States, ever since the mid-twentieth-century McCarthy witch hunts,1 poets and writers who examine the relationships between owners and owned or ask questions about class, race, and other areas of social conflict have been labeled “political.” The term is most often meant to be pejorative. This is ominously like the sort of censorship that exists in severely authoritarian states, not those that proclaim themselves democratic.

In the U.S., to call a certain kind of poetry political has become a label, not a genre. It’s an accusation that limits and derides. It is dismissive, just as it is dismissive to refer to poets as regional or local, implying that they are worthy of the title in their locality but not on a larger stage. “Political poet” is an epithet meant to denote a hack whose work is propaganda at worst, at best writing concerned with ideas that are somehow inferior to those that belong in poetry, a form that they claim should be above such mundane considerations.

There are people who use the label “political poet” in a neutral way or may even mean it as a compliment. What they don’t realize is that all such definitions circumscribe and limit. Despite the existence of centuries of exquisite love poetry in all languages, when we note that so-and-so writes love poems, we most often mean that they produce the saccharine verse that appears on Hallmark greeting cards. When we say someone is a pastoral or landscape poet, we are saying that their work is passive and low-key, devoid of the highs and lows that sound when writing about other subjects; we do not imagine them conveying the drama of monumental weather events or the effect global warming is having on our planet. In a society in which politics has been reduced to the crass power struggles among those who twist language and deed to personal benefit, we stigmatize someone when we call them a political poet.

I write about everything that touches me: my New Mexico high desert landscape; the realities of being a woman,

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