Word: poem
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Maybe you did not think of decorating your college application with a comic strip, or of writing a poem to fill your personal essay space...
...Milton, all found ways to hail or rage against kings and governments through their work. Yeats, unpolitical as anyone could look in his fluffy neckties, wrote stinging political lines. As did Robert Lowell. As does Seamus Heaney. W.H. Auden's September 1, 1939 is a beautiful muddle of a poem on Europe in the shadow of war. Bertolt Brecht's To Posterity, about Germany under the Nazis, is clear as a bell...
...leaders happen not to be poets, they can always seek one's company, so that he may write them into immortality or simply decorate a hard, unlyrical business. John Kennedy had genuine affection for the work of Robert Frost, but the poet's presence at Kennedy's Inaugural -- the poem flapping in the wintry wind -- also served to give a magic power to the occasion, like the blessing of the gods...
...that no matter how heated the single moment, the realization of that moment is of necessity incomplete. The art of politics seems to dance between acting as if every issue were the end of the earth and simultaneously acknowledging that tomorrow will hold up a dozen fresh crucial issues. Poems imply this same incompleteness. Unlike prose, the place that a poem aims and arrives at is less important to the success of the poem than the ideas and images it uses to make the journey. By those ideas and images the poet holds the reader to the process, by which...
...Poems also create their own state of mind, and politics does that as well. Paul Valery defined a poem as a "kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words." The politician produces the political state of mind by means of words. Each does an act of hypnosis by persuading its audience that reality is the world that the poet or politician has constructed for them. In that, the two are equally imaginative. The world they create is an unreality. Yet that world must be grounded in reality, in facts -- the real toads in imaginary...