DAVID MARCUS: Why we must make poetry manly again |
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Throughout English-speaking history, up until about 50 years ago, there had always been men famous in their day for writing beautiful poetry, from William Shakespeare, to Lord Byron, to Robert Frost. Yet, sadly today, our society does not see the poet as a manly figure at all.
This erasure of male voices in poetry was not an accident. Like so many of our society’s woes, it was created by a leftist elite in the academy and publishing who thought that women’s voices had been too long ignored, and men’s too widely celebrated.
(Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty images)
Suddenly, over the past year, we have seen a slew of articles and think pieces asking, what happened to the literary man?
What happened, more or less, was a disastrous decision to tell young men there is nothing masculine about literature, and especially not about poetry.
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This notion that the literary arts are somehow feminine in nature is anhistorical nonsense. Going back to King David, strong men have closed their eyes in search of a muse of fire that could ascend the brightest heavens of invention.
Robert Frost, poet of Amherst, New Hampshire, sits and enjoys a book. (Getty Images)
The zenith of manly poetry may well have come in World War I, in which endless time in the trenches........