Today PoemHunter sent Kipling's "A Child's Garden," a rather vicious parody of R. L. Stevenson, which will seem to readers unfamiliar with his poetry as unKiplingesque as his "Mesopotamia." Unfortunately, and thanks in part to Eliot's ridiculous assertion that Kipling wrote verse and not poetry, those deprived readers include many poets. There are other reasons, especially the common and nearly equally ridiculous characterization of Kipling as a jingoistic propagandist for empire — but what of Pound's truly abhorrent politics? I suspect the Kipling problem, for the School of Phlogiston and the Children of Jorie and other post-modern rear guard movements, is largely that he thought of poetry as a way in which one said something to other people in an attempt to convince, to teach, to entertain, to make a little money, or maybe all four, but not as something done for its own sake. I know that's not entirely fair to the SOP (I do love those initials), since many of them, including Ron Silliman, seem to think of their poetry as in some arcane way political, but until they start making poems for cooks and engineers and housekeepers and carpenters and Ted Kooser's woman who needs her raincoat cleaned, I'm not going to feel guilty about it.
That any art should be made for its own sake is a very peculiar notion, and before the 19th century rise of aesthetic theory its peculiarity was obvious. Samuel Johnson had forgotten fame and influence, but he was not being cynical when he said "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." Trouble is, the thing that purveyors of that peculiar notion have most successfully done is convince ordinary people (and artists) that artists don't need them. Or want them. It's no surprise the feeling is mostly mutual except in pop music, TV, and the movies, where artists still work for the money.
8:25:45 PM 
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