“In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

(I’m pretty sure he means “criticise” in the sense of literary criticism, not general bitching.)

Yet today’s intellectual “progressives,” who often claim to have been influenced by Marx, become truly appalled when functions like literary criticism, or any other academic-like function — or even garden-variety journalism — are performed by people who aren’t credentialed, single-purpose “experts” in those fields.

What is rap music but the great explosion of proletarian poetry long hoped for by socialists? Never in history have so many poor and working class people taken up verse, and never have poets of any kind been more spectacularly reimbursed than today’s rap stars. Without the benefit of a single government arts grant, rap poetry has spread around the world, bringing with it the culture of America’s underclass. Rap replaces native cultures more quickly and successfully than anything ever dreamed of by earlier generations of imperialists, and undermines the morale and morality of other cultures more effectively than an army of upper class bureaucrats or military in high places. You and I may hate rap and everything it stands for with a blue passion, but it rhymes, its metrical — it’s poetry. In fact, being primarily a spoken form of poetry, it has far more in common with the poetry of ancient Greece (beginning with Homer) than the effete Percy Dovetonsils poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries. Rap is also a throwback to the old Greek enthusiasms for bloody murder and buggery. As I say, we may deplore it, but it’s poetry and the authentic expression of the aspirations, obsessions, inner-life of a whole class of people who’s ugly (to us) fascinations have long gone unrecognized by elite or mainstream culture. (Oh, and what long-time IBM CEO Tom Watson, Jr, says about Brooks Brothers suits is true. They are a magic passport to acceptance by the elite.)

1) Read the classics.

2) Listen to classical music.

3) Buy all suits at Brooks Brothers.

I wonder what the equivalent plan would look like today?

I suspect that a lot of people who would have been poets in prior ages are now songwriters.

It’s not obvious why the song is an inferior form of artistic expression to the poem.