A bridge to nowhere

America’s bad poetry is a consequence of the reduction of higher education into merely another arena for the politics of class, race, and gender.
Modernist education is a bridge to nowhere. This is so almost by definition because modernism holds no transcendent aim for man nor even any reliable bedrock of human truth upon which to build.

That explains the airy pomposity of all the college advertisements and websites you will encounter, full of the language of “leadership” and “political change” and very short on any frank assessment of what man is, what he can and cannot accomplish, and where he is going. “O how unlike the place from which they fell,” says Milton in Paradise Lost about the first rhetoricians of the air, the rebel angels. Such is the fall from a classical and Christian education, and the political wisdom and cultural richness it could engender, to what passes for such in these latter days.

Let me tell a story by way of illustration. In the spring of 1981, when I was about to graduate from Princeton, the professor of our 17th-century literature class, Earl Miner, invited me and my classmates to end the term with dinner at his home. Professor Miner loved all things Japanese, for the precision, delicacy, and intelligence of their forms, and that fit very well with the British poetry he taught. A similar elegance strikes one immediately when reading such poets as George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and Andrew Marvell: the form is integral to the meaning. This is no restriction, however. Just as stone pillars and arches, set in place with only the mortar of gravity to bind them, did not restrict Roman architects when they built their aqueducts.