![]() In the Lamp, Walther argues that critics need to show both more ambition in covering highbrow culture and more humility: Ben encouraged those present to support English departments-the ones worth supporting, that is, and, yes, there are a number of such-and encourage their children to major in the humanities. This would mean funding literary publications rather than just political magazines. One point I made at the end was that conservatives needed to start nourishing an interest not just in the ideas of literature but in its form and style. In all, it was encouraging to give the talk and to see it well received. I went on to discuss Michael Oakeshott’s “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind.” Benjamin Myers and Nayeli Riano provided excellent responses. ![]() ![]() This leads sooner or later to the subjugation of poetry to either politics or theology, which, in turn, renders it useless to society as poetry. To value it primarily for what it says rather than how it says it is to undermine its integrity. To value poetry primarily for how it teaches us to be humble and kind, for how it teaches us to be good friends and citizens, for how it teaches us to act justly or to love well is also to view poetry as a means to an end. This is to espouse a view of poetry that is certainly more noble than that of the MFA poets and the Instapoets (who hope to benefit professionally or financially from publication) but not different in kind. The problem of the approach to poetry one finds in Great Books curricula and on the right is that it tends to value poetry, and literature generally, as means of character formation. The talk may be published elsewhere, so I don’t want to say too much, but here is one paragraph where I discuss the problem Walther also identifies: This past weekend I gave a talk at the Philadelphia Society on precisely this topic - the conservative approach to literature and how it tends to view it primarily as means of character formation, which, in turn, can empty literature of much of its value. Bush’s America rather than blowing off my civics homework. I for one shudder to think of what I would have made of Paradise Lost as a maladjusted Marxist teenager if I had been told that by reading it I was shoring up the prospects for George W. My conversations with dozens of former Great Books students leave me with the impression that these texts are understood as an undifferentiated word-mass that exists to be stripmined for ideas (or worse, enlisted in unedifying culture war skirmishes without having been read). ![]() This has meant, among other things, an almost total leveling off of their most arresting formal qualities and thus their ability to defamiliarize human experience. ![]() (Harold Bloom’s slightly more idiosyncratic attempt to promote literature as an anagogic secular priesthood of sorts was perhaps even less successful.) Meanwhile the frequently ill-chosen “Great Books” curriculums common at many conservative-leaning liberal arts colleges have turned so-called canonical texts into fetish objects, totems in the direction of which at least two generations of undergraduates have been taught to gesture with a kind of holy awe. While I am enormously grateful to the broadly neoconservative critics whose bestsellers did a great deal to encourage serious reading in the 1990s, it is difficult now to avoid the conclusion that they won no lasting victories. He notes that social media and declining attention spans are surely partly to blame for highbrow’s woes, but he also wonders if its association with conservative politics has led increasingly liberal young people to view it as suspect: ![]()
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