The Leaden-Eyed -- Vachel Lindsay

This week's theme: Poems with a Purpose.

(Poem #1069) The Leaden-Eyed Let not young souls be smothered out before They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride. It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull, Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed. Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly; Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap; Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve; Not that they die, but that they die like sheep. -- Vachel Lindsay

Art for Art's sake? Not quite. Love poems and nature poems, odes to
melancholy and cats, Life sliced and filleted, funnies and furies -- these
are all very well, but there's a special place in the poetic pantheon for
pieces propounding purely political principles: Poems with a Purpose.

Unfortunately, there are two dangers which such poems often run into, both
easily foreseen, but quite a bit harder to prevent. Firstly, there's the
possibility that the poet allows the moral, social or political aspects of
his poem to overwhelm the purely poetic ones; he is so caught up in _what_
he is saying that he loses sight of _how_ he's saying it. The result, more
often than not, is a stilted, overly didactic piece, the kind which
Coleridge, the later Wordsworth and Shelley wrote far too many of. It was
this danger that the Imagists were warning against with their tenet "Show,
don't tell"; it was this possibility that Archibald MacLeish was reacting to
when he wrote "A poem should not mean / but be" [1].

The second danger is, ironically, the exact obverse of the first: namely,
the possibility that the poem's readers respond, not to the purely poetic
merits of the verse, but to the political ones; they allow their agreement
(or lack thereof) with the poet's philosophy to cloud their judgement when
it comes to evaluating the poem per se [2]. There are two ways to avoid this
danger; the easy one is to retreat into platitudes that offend nobody (but
equally, please nobody). That way lies mediocrity.

The other, more difficult way is to do what Vachel Lindsay does in today's
poem: find something you feel strongly about, which nonetheless has not been
bromided to death by a thousand previous moralisers, express it in words
fresh enough to be powerful, and leave it at that. The reader will do the
rest.

thomas.

[1] Poem #188, "Ars Poetica" -- Archibald MacLeish

[2] It might be argued that this is not a flaw: a poem that arouses strong
passions (favourable or otherwise) in its readers is a poem that's doing
_something_ right.

[Links]

Here's a nice resource on Lindsay's life and works:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lindsay/lindsay.htm

Here are some Imagist poets on the Minstrels:
Poet #Kreymborg -- Alfred Kreymborg
Poet #Sandburg -- Carl Sandburg
Poet #Pound -- Ezra Pound
Poet #D. -- H. D.
Poet #Williams -- William Carlos Williams

Here are some previous poems, each with their own respective Purposes:
Poem #26, Jerusalem  -- William Blake
Poem #592, Sonnet: England in 1819 -- Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poem #132, Dulce Et Decorum Est  -- Wilfred Owen
Poem #28, To Whom It May Concern  -- Adrian Mitchell