Political Poetry and Party Poetry

Much of our political poetry probably belongs to a subsidiary type--party poetry, or poetry with a partisan edge. I prefer poetry with broader understanding, if not wider sympathies: 
​“The Iliad, our oldest western epic, was designed as therapy for post-traumatic stress. It was written and recited to fulfill this role and it did so successfully. Simone Weil said that The Iliad is also the only epic in western history that doesn’t take sides between the two warring parties. It mourns the death of the Trojans as much as it does of the Achaeans, the Greeks. [Jonathan] Shay [in Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, 1994] thinks that this may have been because it was performed for and in order to heal descendants of both sides. Shay’s point is that a culture that recited The Iliad orally, that had its combat veterans listening to The Iliad, was a culture that still thought that war is, as Simone Weil says, something that hurts not only the losers, but also the winners.”-- Timothy Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty

Achilles fighting against Memnon, Leiden Rijksmuseum voor Outheden (Jona Lendering, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)

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