If I could just slip in a little comment --

When I was first involved in writing, "politics" was a distinct thing, it was politics as such, it concerned statements about polity. If you didn't make any statements of that kind you weren't being 'political' in that instance, though you may be at other times.  There has been a shift (maybe as a result of the teachings of the Frankfurt school, I'm not sure) whereby politics becomes deeply infused into all language-use, so that you cannot possibly escape it, and your political statements are no longer necessarily political, if you see what I mean.  Politics is totalised. As it concerns poetry I think this has had two results--

1) You no longer read a poem. You read as it were a manifestation of the poet, and if the poet (like Pound) is known to have had obnoxious political views you don't trust or take any pleasure in anything he writes.  The entity "Arnold" for instance could now be as-it-were stained and every manifestation of "Arnold" could be shunned as a possible source of infection.  Crudely put: Do you stop reading "Dover Beach" because of "Culture and Anarchy"? Do you stop reading Personae because the late Cantos?  ( This is all rather extreme but some of the comments here have leaned towards this kind of attitude, and it has certainly had an effect at large on the reading of Eliot's poetry, all of it. Probably the position of Lawrence needs to be carefully examined in this regard). 

2) When and if you do read a single poem, you find politics in it whatever. A daffodil becomes political. And the poet may be criminalised because of the political implications of focussing on daffodils (instead of... etc.) (or because they're yellow or pretty or somehow female or whatever) and this is theoretically justified by a categorical mis-use of words like "pastoral" and "lyrical".  

I find that this totalisation of politics actually makes it a lot more difficult to think about politics and to make political statements . Becoming so widespread and diffused, politics readily lends itself to simplification, like any kind whatsoever of rebelliousness or dissenting is automatically good politics, as on the other side any sort of retention is. Politics becomes an emotion more than anything else. Political thought is also disabled by the assumption that it is unnecessary to know how politics works (how governmental decisions are made, what the precise interplay of forces is, how the economy is balanced, what the practical results of certain acts are likely to be, for instance) and thus lends itself easily to idealism or Guy-Fawkes-ism.  Paradoxically this is entirely in keeping with mass media treatment of politics on a prejudiced personal and emotional level, except that there it is generally hypocritical -- a cynical means of attaining a political result. 

Well generally it starts to look like a complete mess of thought with all sorts of good intentions sticking out here and there.

I'm not referring at all closely to anything said around these parts.  Just chewing the cud. 

I'll be interested to see what people think about all this (but by the way I probably shan't see any more posts for three weeks).

PR