Horst thinks:
"Things change so fast in our times! What did that Marx fellow say...all that was sacred is profaned, all that was solid melts into air? Perhaps he should have been a poet, not a failed prophet." (ELEVEN, p. 251)
Poets and prophets are related. Whereas the Hebrews had Moses and the prophets, the Greeks had Homer and the poets. Both Biblical and Classical literary sources were regarded as divinely inspired authorities on theology and morality.
Any writer addresses his public about life. If he is too close to his public, then he writes what they expect, producing trite, pro-status-quo cliches, whereas, if he gets too far away from or ahead of them, then he becomes a voice crying in the wilderness. I have read the suggestion that the perfect poem expresses an equilateral triangle with poet, public and life equidistant from each other. Thus, the poet neither panders nor preaches but provokes?
I agree that things change fast and that Marx expressed this poetically.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Already in Chapter Eleven of SHADOWS OF ANNIHILATION? That makes me even more eager to read my own copy!
Both Catholics and Protestants believe the Bible to be divinely inspired, even tho we interpret it in very different ways. And that can't help but also mean that what the Scriptures say is influencing public affairs now. Even if many are hostile to Christianity today.
I thought of Dante's DIVINE COMEDY as being one of those perfect poems acting as an equilateral triangle with the poet, his audience, and life equidistant from each other. I even believe Dante had a real vision of the afterlife and thus came to have something of the prophet in him as well.
Ad astra! Sean
Tho' Dante couldn't help putting some people he disliked personally in his vision of Hell.
Something that (hopefully) would not happen now.
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