Food for thought: Would you accept an invitation to a Democrat White House for a poetry reading or whatever???
No wonder, after being forced, no doubt, to listen to cuckoo mommy's rants.
I'm very glad Laura was wise enough not to allow these shameless liberals disgrace and dishonor the real poets, past and current. I find it refreshing that Laura Bush had sense enough to see what was coming if she allowed this non-political event become a opportunity for these agenda driven people to use this venue to spew their hatred for this country and our President.
Oh!!! I almost forgot.... I LOATHE LIBERALS
Nobody fears bad American poetry. I'd imagine that the Bushes just don't like being insulted to their face by morons.
Mark Twain, whom she calls the "first real American writer," so eat your heart out Bradstreet, Edwards, Franklin, Irving, Douglass, Emerson, Thoreau (especially you, Henry, you civilly disobedient antiwar tree-hugger, you).
I wouldn't call Twain the "first real American writer," but I think it's obvious what she meant. Do you notice a difference between Twain's writing style and those of the other writers mentioned? You should: they're tremendously different. Emerson and Thoreau and the rest of the bunch are all wordy and indebted, stylistically, to English models; Twain isn't, and most American writing in the 20th century has followed Twain in that regard.
if they're willing to forgo all that, antiwar feeling must be positively rampaging across the land.
No --- it's just that the asshole quotient is higher among mediocre American poets.
"There is nothing political about American literature," Laura Bush has said. But it would be hard to find writers more subversive than the three she chose for her event. Whitman's epic of radical democracy, Leaves of Grass, was so scandalous it got him fired from his government job;
But not for the book's politics. Whitman's boss thought it was indecent because of some of its frank depictions of sexuality.
Hughes, a Communist sympathizer hounded by McCarthy, wrote constantly and indelibly about racism, injustice, power;
Okay.
Dickinson might seem the least political, but in some ways she was the most lastingly so--every line she wrote is an attack on complacency and conformity of manners, mores, religion, language, gender, thought.
That's exaggerated BS of course; Dickinson wasn't political --- in fact, she was one of the least political poets America has ever had. Nobody honestly dealing with her poetry can pretend otherwise.
None of these quintessentially American writers would have given two cents for family values (Whitman was gay, as perhaps were Hughes and Dickinson), abstinence education, the death penalty, tax cuts for the rich, Ashcroftian attacks on civil liberties or the other hallmarks of the Bush regime. It's hard to imagine them cheering the bombing of Baghdad.
Hughes would be opposed, Dickinson wouldn't care, while Whitman would almost certainly be for it: he was a big trumpeter of spreading American democracy around the world, and believed strongly that it was worth fighting for. He certainly would have no truck for a guy like Saddam Hussein, a man opposed to every single thing Whitman held sacred.
Is this the same daughter who asked her Ma for a little flag, just a little one, to fly from her own room, after 9/11? And Ma said YOU'RE GROUNDED!