Ernest says:

>Think the academics may be asleep, thinking they're not wishing to risk
>the scandal of writing about social issues.



Almost see what could be meant here, but I'd want to qualify or rather
stray a little, of course the poets are worse than the academics and the
real risks lie (I think) not in writing about social issues but in
allowing a text to arouse its own culpability AS a social issue. Anyone
with a suited level of compassion (would that everyone were anyone) can
deliver a viable platform of criticism for fostering agreement, and this
is not a needless or ineffective exercise; but these texts do not appear
to me to be allegorizing social problems in any material way whatsoever -
that is, they are conscientious observations of material circumstances
that can stimulate further observation, but they are not themselves (by
any politics of mimetic arousal) those material circumstances. This is
not an inability endemic to poems, nor is it necessary in them. I suspect
that most goodhearted poets are afraid of a diminished moral amplitude,
which they predict as the bad conscience and potential subjection to
polemic that anyone -culpable- must incur; this is fair enough, but rather
repetitive and inert.



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