The apostle Paul exhorts Timothy to hold fast the ‘form of sound words,’ by which he means, ‘Christian doctrine’ (2 Timothy 1.13.) How lamentable is it to have to exhort our anti-intellectuals (our university professors and their radical students) to hang on to English sense! In that same letter to Timothy, the apostle Paul prophesies the coming of a ‘form of godliness’ among professors of Christianity; in other words, a religion in outward form only, without authenticity and power. Our phony poets are like these empty professors of religion; they are empty professors of literature. In fact, their poems are not even on the level of outward form, as hypocritical professors of Christianity are. Even though they are extolled as the gurus of literature, they are counterfeits in their field; and, it is regretful and biblical to say, fools. (But for the grace of God go we.) If postmodernist poetry is groundbreaking, it breaks ground, not toward a new primitivism merely, but beyond primitivism toward that which is ‘without form, and void,’ where ‘darkness’ is ‘upon the face of the deep.’ The authors of monstrous verse like this must be lost souls indeed! Our prayer for these creatures of the deep must be, Let there be light, O God! Formless poems originate from darkness. Light from the voice of God is what their authors need the most. “O send out thy light and thy truth: let them lead me; let them bring me unto thy holy hill, and to thy tabernacles” (Psalm 43.3.)
Undecipherable poems come predominantly, if not exclusively, from leftist milieus; this makes perfect sense. Leftist Duckspeak strikingly aligns, not with socialism merely, but with 1984’s socialist party, Ingsoc. By flipping through the parts of 1984 that I have highlighted, I am struck by how much today’s Left has in common with Ingsoc. Like Ingsoc, it came of age in the 1960s (p. 120.) Like Ingsoc, it tries to control the future by controlling the past; that is to say, by rewriting it (pp. 119, 125.) Like Ingsoc, it likes to keep small rules (like whether you can provide straws in your restaurant or not), but feels free to break big ones (like assisting illegal migrants and facilitating terrorism, p. 209.) Really, it will break any rule if it thinks it won’t get caught (p. 230.) It censors its opponents (p. 126) to such a degree as to remind us of ‘Thought Police’ (pp. 97, 100.) Its members are so robotically subservient to this ideology that they seem unconscious (p. 139.) Its most prejudiced adherents are young women (p. 97.) Its object is persecution for its own sake; and its end is power. Mark it, power is not its means, but its end (p. 338.) Its notion of Freedom is Slavery to the State (p. 339.) And, which brings us back to the subject at hand, its ‘heresy of heresies’ is ‘common sense’ (p. 162.) The Ingsoc of 1984 and the Postmodern Left are virtually the same thing. It is from this wicked womb that the worst of the worst writing is born. Stillborn literature may be given a semblance of life; but it cannot truly live; so it is destined not to last. If our neo-Marxists would use the embryotomy scissors on their literature instead of on the heads of babies in the womb, how much better off would the world be and how much less deserving of the LORD’s indignation and fury?
When it is no longer deemed necessary for words to come together to form rational thoughts, writing has become purposeless employment. Maybe it has a little purpose, for words are still being used and the fingers are getting some exercise. The next step on the descending ladder is the use of non-words, like those CAPTCHA words that we are made to type in order to prove we’re not robots on internet sites—words like ‘tbilin’ and ‘baliti,’ the last two ‘words’ that I had to type into ‘Google Books’ in order to access a public domain document. We are already, to a degree, on this next step, for non-words like ‘ancyclical’ and ‘Ghazal’ are not hard to find in contemporary poems. It is now popular for poets to perplex instead of enlighten or even inform. Commenting on a poem by another blinding poet, Rita Dove, Mr. Lane says, “I leave this poem as mystified as I was when I entered it...Questions follow questions. A great poem does that. Sometimes there are no answers” (The Globe and Mail, June 17th, 2000.) Offer such poetry to 19th century England and you might qualify for a room in a lunatic asylum. Questions are more desired than answers because postmodern philosophy is about truth being undiscoverable, and therefore, unprofitable to look for.
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