purple motes

The economist:

the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. ... I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; ... soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil. ... Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.[1]

The bureaucrat:

A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstition. The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward. ... But in whatever degree poetry is cultivated, it must necessarily be to the neglect of some branch of useful study: and it is a lamentable spectacle to see minds, capable of better things, running to seed in the specious indolence of these empty aimless mockeries of intellectual exertion. Poetry was the mental rattle that awakened the attention of intellect in the infancy of civil society: but for the maturity of mind to make a serious business of the playthings of its childhood, is as absurd as for a full-grown man to rub his gums with coral, and cry to be charmed to sleep by the jingle of silver bells.[2]

The poet:

Whilst the mechanist abridges, and the political economist combines labor, let them beware that their speculations, for want of correspondence with those first principles which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have in modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and want. ... The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the State is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty. ... Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.[3]

The bell rings, the curtain drops, the conference ends, so much say so. But what is truth?

Google provides the means for useful study. The table below shows the number of search results returned for various search strings. The column "Top Match" gives the rank of the first result that directly references the relevant quote above. Some facts:

• Poets far outdistance economists and bureaucrats in generating results. Poetry apparently is a common defense in human life. The relatively poor showing of bureaucrats suggests a need to increase public appreciation for bureaucrats.
• "Economists ideas power 'vested interests'" tops "poets legislators." This result indicates that economists' words have been more fecund than poets'.
• Poetry "useful study" shows few results, but that does not seem to be associated with results from "specious indolence."
• Persons seeking symbolic results should put the poor before the rich. "poor poorer rich richer" delivers about ten times as many results as "rich richer poor poorer." The poet, lacking the calculating facility, lacked this insight.

Notes:

[1] Keynes, John Maynard (1936), The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Chapter 24, Sec. 5. I have re-arranged the order of the quoted sentences.

[2] Peacock, Thomas Love (1820), "The Four Ages of Poetry," in Ollier's Literary Miscellany. Peacock worked for about 37 years as a clerk in the East India Company.

[3] Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1821), "Defense of Poetry," circulated in manuscript, but first published in 1840. Peacock and Shelley were close friends. Shelley's "Defense of Poetry" was a response to Peacocks "The Four Ages of Poetry."

2 Comments

Emily Lord on poets, couch potatomen:

All that I'm telling you is based on true reality. I was married to one once and was thrown into the midst of hordes of them. Everyone was a poet or wannabe back in the sixties. I never met a poet I liked. They drink everything and vomit on your shoes and then run off with your raincoat unless it's sunny...then they stay until they've eaten everything in the house. They kept taking my tweezers and pinking shears (god knows why) and their buttons fly off. Once I cloroxed all their ecru India guru garb till they were clean as diapers. They had to roll around in the front yard till they looked beat enough for a reading. We had a first edition of a paperback book that was worth a bundle (August Derleth? some one who wrote about Boston in a genre horror) and one of them took it and sold it and went somewhere, like France. That's just for starters. They want you to cook tacos for them in N.H. when there are only root vegetables to be had. I got two pieces of bazooka gum and an old copy of The Rolling Stone for Xmas from one. I had just painted his entire house after plastering most of the downstairs, reglazed 39 windows and painted them all, made dinner for forty with Chicken comtadine, and real almond mousse junk in a casserole lined with madelaines I had to bake myself in a tilty oven that smelled like dead mice. I did all of the above wearing high heels in an unheated house (and garb). Romantic? Like NOT!! They kiss the mirror and you have to Windex it or you could catch something. The most romantic person I ever met was thirteen. After that you're faking it. (thirteen-year-old is out at the moment. Now in love with pasty thin boy with faded green hair). Marvell was just romancing his self...he was the worm and in the end the poem gilds not the lily but the bulb.

This text, which I have slightly edited, appeared in an Internet discussion forum in 2001. Lacking trust in the great Internet cloud, I printed it out. Thus, apparently, this wonderful treasure has been saved from some benighted webmaster who pointlessly clear-cut space on a server.

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