Lives of Our Leaders: The Republic

Plato believed that poets had no place in his Republic, and he had a point. Would you have wanted Ezra Pound or Marinetti, both fascist sympathizers, making decisions for you? Would you have wanted Eliot, an anti-Semite, as your minister of culture, or Lowell, a resident of McLean Hospital, as your secretary of state, despite his poetic stature and erudition? We love the beats⎯Ginsberg, Baraka, Ferlinghetti and Corso⎯but they were all plainly nuts. Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop were our high priestesses, but they loved poetry more than life itself. Anne Sexton, John Berryman and Sylvia Plath all killed themselves, and the Secret Service is better trained to deal with assassination than suicide. OK, Wallace Stevens sold insurance and could qualify as bridging the gap between imagination and reality, but would we really have wanted him as Treasury Secretary or Federal Reserve Chief? (Not that any of the recent occupants of these positions⎯Geithner, Bernanke, Greenspan or Volcker⎯have done better for lacking a muse). And then there is dear old wizened Robert Frost (who turned out to be not so dear) speaking in the snow at JFK’s inauguration. Where would he fit in our less-than-ideal republic? Yes, he knew something about the inner life and the road less travelled, but would that have really qualified him to be Secretary of the Interior or of Transportation? Yes, you have a point if you bring up Yeats. He understood something about the price we pay for our passions, but in the end he was too caught up with his Maud Gonne. Dante, who drew a map of hell with Virgil as his guide, and Homer, who wrote the greatest epic, seem to have possessed divine knowledge, but when push came to shove, would they have been able to apply it to commerce? And then there’s Cassius Clay, aka Muhammad Ali, the Ogden Nash of fighters. He became an elder statesman and prince, but can we ever forgive him for the way he talked to Joe Frazier?