OK, I was being, say, a little disingenuous. I wouldn't spend my life
writing poetry if I really thought it completely useless. But your list
doesn't illustrate anything except the perceived utilities of art, which
have little or nothing or nothing to do with art, or the processes of
making art. It's an attitude that's endemic in government arts funding
here.
"Influence" isn't the same as "use". How effective REALLY, say, was
Swift's political writing, except to reveal to him that literary "power"
has no purchase in the world of realpolitik (an understanding that made
him a devastatingly self conscious prose artist)? And I think Milan
Kundera is right to complain that the fuss about Satanic Verses
effectively erased the book.
My understanding is that the only thing that saved Paris was that Speer's
Berlin was going to outshine it - Hitler actually had planned to raze it
to the ground, BECAUSE of its architecture, as nothing could outshine the
Reich. But that's by the by.
>7. Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, to Boethius himself
That seems to me to be a "use".
Rukeyser's series of lectures The Life of Poetry expressed something of
what I think the "uses" of poetry might be.
AC
>1. Effect of ny abstract expressionist painting on diplomatic relations
>between u.s. and europe
>
>2. Effect of John Lyly's eulogies and drama in obtaining for him the
>position of master of revels under Elizabeth
>
>3. Influence of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on the practical thinking
>of Joseph Goebbels
>
>4. Quality of architecture in Paris, the determining fact that deterred its
>occupying Nazi general from putting Hitler's 'scorched earth' policy into
>effect and razing the entire city
>
>5. Influence of the characteristics of Jane Austen's prose interests on the
>British film industry
>
>6. Influence of Paradise Lost on the establishment and continuation of the
>Specator and Tatler
>
>7. Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, to Boethius himself
>
>8. Satanic Verses
>
>9. Influx of Language Poets in u.s. in English dept.s at universities
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