I was struck a little bit lopsided by this post over at Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog. Usually, I find some pretty interesting commentary on this blog, but this one struck me as a bit shallow. The blogger, Lucia Perillo, asked “Why do poets tend to be liberal?” On the surface it seems like a reasonable question. Poets do tend to the liberal side, don’t we?

I guess that depends on what you mean by “liberal.” Ezra Pound has often been criticized for his fascist views. Not exactly the darling of liberalism. But aside from the conservative/liberal dichotomy, Perillo’s post is boldly shallow in another way. She actually had the audacity to write this sentence into a paragraph at the end of her post:

Maybe this is why there is not much good poetry written about war (OK: Homer) compared to the bulk of good poetry written about love.

That’s an awfully nutty thing to say on a poetry blog. I’ve read countless love poems that were mere drivel. But the volumes of good war poetry can be stacked to the moon. Stephen Crane’s “War Is Kind” comes to mind. Walt Whitman wrote some fabulous poems during the Civil War and many of them have withstood the test of time in the American narrative of poetics. One of my favorite poems is “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Tennyson.

If we remove the classics we can still find good war poetry being written today, though admittedly not by many total liberals. But they aren’t all written by fascists either.

I said I wouldn’t discuss Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet again until I finished my fourth reading of it, which I did last night. I am not ready yet to publish my review, but he has a few good poems on war in that book, the latest of the war poets worth a read. The title poem itself probably has the most widespread recognition but I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s the best poem in the book despite it’s being a good read. Virtually every war of the 20th century produced at least one poet who wrote on war quite effectively and worth a read. So this business about where is all the good war poetry was really just kind of silly.

Are poets too liberal? Some of us, I suppose, but if we consider that liberalism (classical liberalism, at any rate) has always been about individualism and free markets then I’d say we’re probably not liberal enough. And I’ve never understood why war has been lumped into the laps of conservatives. Liberals start wars too and they’re not always to save the poor from poverty.