Poetry Belongs to The People

Can you imagine a national bookclub today?

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, September 18, 2025 – Whatever else myriad poetry is, at the most basic level, it is the preservation and re-purposing of personal encounters with the light that illuminates and seasons our temporal processions through life, or through this vale of tears, as a poet may put it, a dash of melancholy added for emphasis.

Because it is made up of language, the base common denominator that collects people into great seas of civilization, poetry is the property of the people. It is the primary means by which the people apprehend its own power and majesty, which is why friends and enemies of the people, from genial monarchs to feckless despots, will always try to subjugate poetry to their own purposes.

The artifice of poet laureate is an example of that, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Queen Victoria’s most famous house poet, gives a perfect demonstration of how the people’s property can be weaponized and turned against them.

Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, composed with the simple rhythm and rhyme that appeals to adolescents, glosses over his monarch’s invasion of Crimea, then admonishes soldiers “not to reason why, but to do and die.”

Tennyson’s shameful poem inspired Rudyard Kipling, forty years later, to publish The Last of the Light Brigade, which illuminates the suffering of the survivors of the Crimean campaign, long since forgotten by the monarch, like discharged artillery shells.

Upon that pair of poems, I rest my case. If they don’t convince you that poetry must be kept close to the people, and out of the hands of arbitrary political power, no matter how benign it may appear to be. (The virgin queen looked as cuddly as a generic gramma.)

The prominence given the people in America’s founding documents sufficed to keep us free of poet laureates until our collective resolve weakened during the Great Depression. In the 1930s, congress grafted onto the office of the librarian of congress an office for a consultant in poetry. (But not a consultant in music, sculpture, dance, architecture, painting, trigonometry, biology, warfare…?)

Given the voracious nature of political patronage, that consultancy blossomed into a full-blown poet laureateship during the literary renaissance of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. If the thought of Ronnie Raygun presiding over the national bookclub is risible, please re-imagine it under the current librarian-in-chief, dear sisters and brothers.