19 This is the part about poets being bards for the people.
The poet, like any human, may be a monster. The question is what sort of monster—and why?
Plato banished poets from the Republic because their tragic odes distracted the citizens from trusting reason and philosophy to resolve political problems. The tragic poet refuses to promise solubility: suffering may redeem nothing, pain may divide without the possibility of reparation, humans may continue acting horribly even after absorbing the knowledge of good and evil.
In The Republic, Socrates feared the “tragic poets” because empathy had the potential to undermine the collective drive, as compassion has the capacity to stir the mind against its principles. The Romanian dictator criminalized pessimism as an act of sabotage, a violation of national security that undermined the efforts of the socialist republic.
In many republics, the people play an ornamental role that accessories the vanguard’s theories. This problem isn’t new. And it maps onto another problem, namely, the way philosophy has always struggled with questions of access to knowledge. Giordano Bruno had to abandon his monk hood because he read forbidden books in the bathroom.
For poets, the temptation first approaches us on tiptoe: “You weirdo,” it whispers, “you can use your facility with words to gain power and lead others! You can be mounted on a horse with people at your feet.” And thus, it arrives as a horse (or a donkey), like most monumental ego-trips, and cajoles us to mount the saddle and play bard of the people. As long as the poet remains human, their biggest temptation resembles the intellectual’s lure to power: to fashion the self into a vanguard that represents others definitively.
No one on the Odyssean ship was a poet or a hero, Marina Tsvetaeva insisted in her essay, “The Artist and Conscience.” By her definition, the “hero” would have managed to keep going without being tied to the mast or needing to stuff their ears with wax. The hero is someone with extraordinary self-discipline. Tsvetaeva’s view of the heroic verges on the divine. Her hero isn’t quite human, and this allows her to contrast the heroic act with the poetic one.
For Tsvetaeva, the poet is human to a fault. The poet “is one who would throw himself into the water even when tied up, who could hear with the wax in his ears … once again, he would throw himself into the water.” Because risk is part of the poet’s way of being, the poet cannot understand “the half measure of ropes and wax,” in Tsvetaeva’s words. The poet cannot understand the methods of the hero or the ways in which the tongue is tied to appease the gods of the ocean, or the ear taught to fear the song of the sirens.
I suspect we are all imagined by our readers. I suspect we co-create each other from resonances and echoes.
I can’t find a metaphor to bridge the gaps.
