The Andrea Mitchell Center is pleased to announce a new initiative, “Poetry and Politics,” in which the Center will pursue the interrelation between poetry broadly defined (poetry proper, literature, and imaginative works of philosophy) and democratic politics. The  aspiration is to probe the intersections between aesthetics and politics, hopeful that poetic analysis and political analysis might be mutually enriching. The Mitchell Center is pleased to welcome Owen Boynton, a literary scholar and teacher, to spearhead the program by interpreting poetic works in posts that will be shared periodically with the Mitchell Center community.   

• [NEW] Literary Criticism, Civic Disagreement, and Education
  
  

  This post departs from attending to one poet to consider a broad and long tradition of literary criticism—what might be called evaluative criticism though it is not the same as ‘reviewing.’ It argues that our current political divides are a consequence not only of a lost framework of facts, but divides in how we imagine what must, by necessity, be a matter of conjecture and uncertainty; and that if we do not recover a sense of discerning the truth in how others imagine the world, we will be unlikely to overcome those divides. Evaluative criticism offers a training ground for doing so, if educational institutions are willing to embrace it.

  
  
• Jim Powell's "Substrate"
  
  

  This post takes as its subject (and perhaps introduces readers to) the contemporary American poet Jim Powell, devoting attention to the poetic sequence “Substrate” from the 2009 collection of the same name. The voices of “Substrate” are voices from the history of the North American West; but the sequence gains political significance for what it makes of that essential political concept, “voice”— saving “voice” from an echo chamber, voice against voice, and restoring it to the recalcitrant facticity of the world.

  
  
• Lucille Clifton's "jasper texas 1998"
  
  

  This post consists of a reading of “jasper texas 1998” by Lucille Clifton, finding in the poem a meditation on the political and poetic imagination in relation to hope, despair, and injustice. 
  
  

• Samuel Johnson's "The Vanity of Human Wishes"
  
  This post reads Samuel Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (an imitation of Juvenal’s tenth satire). Johnson’s sensitivity to what is general and common among humankind spurs him to portray delusions and follies, political and otherwise, as the consequence of moral abstractions acting with physical force in human affairs. In so doing, he restores us to an account of political life that accommodates judgment without insisting on definitive explanations for behaviors and choices we may never fully understand.
  
  
• Walt Whitman's "The Sleepers"
  
  This post develops what the relationship of public and private might mean for political poetry by reading Walt Whitman’s “The Sleepers.”  It suggests that Whitman’s poetry, rather than rejecting “decorum” as an ideal for poetry, reimagines it in relation to the dignity of private life essential for democracy.
  
  
• Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est"
  
  The longstanding connection between the expressive medium of poetry and the violent political phenomenon of war illuminates how the human mind wrestles with morality, suffering, justice, duty, and friendship, to name only a few subjects. The poet and WWI soldier Wilfred Owen offers us a personal glimpse of war through his verses, and his “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1920) remains one of the most popular war poems to this day. Through an analysis of his famous poem, this post considers the broader significance of “war poetry” for foundational questions in politics and political philosophy. 
  
  
• Sarah Kirsch's Ice Roses: Selected Poems
  
  Politics, rather than being a strictly public affair, involves establishing boundaries between private and public spaces. Drawing on the theoretical work of Mary Douglas, this post reads twentieth-century poet German poet Sarah Kirsch as an example of how the poetic imagination can participate in the adjudication of public and private life.
  
  

• Percy Shelley's "England in 1819"
  
  Percy Shelley is among the most politically invested poets to write in English. Reading his “England in 1819,” this post finds in the poem’s wording both a yearning for political change and an understanding of what sort of change it might be possible for a poem (or at least this poem) to bring about. 
  
  
• Thomas Hardy's "The Voice"
  
  For his first post, Boynton examines Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Voice” and, along the way, further elaborates the ambition of the Mitchell Center’s new “Poetry and Politics” initiative.