Different as the two poets are in many ways, and though Frost conducted a kind of private war with Eliot, it is possible to discer...n interesting resemblances beneath the obvious contrasts. In both men the central theme is metaphysical desolation. Both poets are profoundly at odds with the current of secular optimism flowing from the Enlightenment through the nineteenth century. Frost's New England landscape, spare, hard, and usually unyield ing, inhabited by its declining Yankee stock, can be taken as an extended metaphor expressive of that desolation. In Frost's poetry the central persona or dramatic voice speaking the poems finds ways to live with that desolation. In Eliot's poetry the central persona lives through and finally beyond the desolation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The spectacle [of American politics] resembles that of swarms of insects changing from worms to wings. They must get the wings or ...die. For our salvation, Mr. Wilbur Wright is providing wings. He will also have to provide a new insect to use them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity throu...gh multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Moscow, breathing fire like a human volcano with its smouldering lava of passion, ambition and politics, its hurly- burly of meeti...ngs and entertainment.... Moscow seethes and bubbles and gasps for air. It's always thirsting for something new, the newest events, the latest sensation. Everyone wants to be the first to know. It's the rhythm of life today.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If American politics does not look to you like a joke, a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left in you, on any plea, on a...ny excuse, to vote for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party (for at present machine and party are one), or for any candidate who does not stand for a new era,--then you yourself pass into the slide of the magic-lantern; you are an exhibit, a quaint product, a curiosity of the American soil. You are part of the problem.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whatever else American thinkers do, they psychologize, often brilliantly. The trouble is that psychology only takes us so far. The... new interest in families has its merits, but it will have done us all a disservice if it turns us away from public issues to private matters. A vision of things that has no room for the inner life is bankrupt, but a psychology without social analysis or politics is both powerless and very lonely.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own... a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy. A year later there is a new political ring or a change in the paper's ownership, consequence: more confusion, more contradiction, a sudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their distillation, the reaction against them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most condensed format of the conversionist motif is the TV commercial, which has become essential to both network and religiou...s broadcasting. Embedded in its structure are sentiments from our religious and political heritage: salvation and choice. Newness of life can now be associated with a change of heart about politics, the purchase of a new car, or the selection of a beverage. A Pepsi commercial, for example, designed to fit the charismatic personality and gifts of singer Michael Jackson, became an invitation to make a decision and join in. Images and sounds of the soft-drink ad drew viewers into a growing throng of happy, dancing people following the steps of a dynamic cultural hero. Even couch potatoes might have been roused, vicariously at least, to skip lightly behind the agile Jackson as he led his ecstatic followers to the right choice. The conversionist call in this instance is to come on up to the good life through Pepsi. Nonetheless it plays upon the persuasive motifs of turning around and becoming a part of something larger.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Colonel [John Charles] Fremont. Not a good picture, but will do to indicate my politics this year. For free States and against new... slave States.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under... a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet--the scientific poet--of a new mythology.... Each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant.... They compel the facts to verify a favorite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection. And because they thus act like good artists, sound thinkers and tried experimenters, the prisons are full, political heretics are worked to death as slaves, the rights and preferences of mere individuals are ignored, the Gandhis are murdered and from morning till night a million school-teachers and broadcasters proclaim the infallibility of the bosses who happen at the moment to be in power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »