Those words of Garrison Keillor, from the book "Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America." I'm reading that today — the day after Keillor's downfall — just by chance. I'm listening to the audiobook "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion," and the author, Jonathan Haidt, offers that Keillor quote as "captur[ing] the spirit and self-image of the modern American left." Haidt adds: "I’m not sure how many Americans have sacrificed their lives for kindness and poetry...."
I could talk about what a phony Garrison Keillor is — "plain thoughts," indeed — or go on at length about the excellence of Haidt's book, but what I did was Google "Who died for poetry?," and that got me to an article titled "The Man Who Died for Poetry":
When Osip Mandelstam died at age 47 in a Siberian work camp under the Stalin regime, he became one of twentieth-century poetry's most famous martyrs. Vastly talented and fearlessly subversive, he is perhaps best remembered for his scathing "Stalin Epigram," the poem that sealed his fate....Here's "The Stalin Epigram" (by different translators, W.S. Merlin and Clarence Brown):
[Christian Wiman, the translator]: We think of Mandelstam as the quintessential twentieth-century European poet, hounded to death by an out-of-control state and writing poems of fierce, poignant protest. He was that, of course, but he was also, right up to the end, funny and friendly and crazed in the best sense. Poetry was fun for him.... Honestly, I think it's this pure and irrepressible lyric spirit that drove Stalin mad, even more than the famous poem that Mandelstam wrote in mockery of Stalin. Mandelstam—his gift and the untamable nature of it—was like a thorn in Stalin's brain....
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