* RADIO RANT: Conservative Literary Criticism

Kipling's "If" is not a "great poem": it is wretched didacticism, a series of bromides & anodynes set to verse.
I see that I have been truant in my role as chief tormentor of Michael Savage. (Well, I'm sure that plenty of others wear the same mantle, so I don't worry unduly in this regard.) But last night (5/18/07), "Doctor Savage" raised my hackles once again, in praising Rudyard Kipling's "If" as a "great poem." "If" is not a great poem: it is wretched didacticism; "If" isn't even poetry, really (in the post-Coleridgean sense of the word): it's a series of prosaic bromides and anodynes set to verse. (Frankly, I would think that even most college freshmen today have more "taste" than to put up the poster-art of such verbal schmaltz in their dorm room.) Savage's judgment is no doubt colored by his fond childhood memory of having memorized this doggerel in school; it certainly isn't based on any accepted criteria of literary criticism. (The criterion that a fine work of art should have a "good, moral message" went out of fashion a century ago. But this was probably due to the onslaughts of amoral liberalism, Savage would no doubt claim.) The good Doctor did acknowledge that Kipling was ultimately criticized as a blithe spokesperson for British imperialism, but Savage couldn't fathom how being such a spokesperson is an—uhm—bad thing. (Rather, he ironically goes on to boast about how he's imparting "greater knowledge" to his listeners, about poems and such.)

To go beyond Savage to better objections to my objection—yes, recent critical theories of alterity (e.g., postcolonial theory, feminism, queer theory, and ecocriticism) ARE political/ethical stances in their own right, liberal & idealistic defenses of the "underdog." As a poco/eco-critic, I am inordinately conscious of my own ideology, as but one aspect of a multitude of contemporary discourses—NOT as the norm that sets itself up as a theo-philosophical "Word" for the rest of the world, as Savage's nostalgia about (and deification of) his smugly-content-because-blindly-monolithic Euro-American classroom & neighborhood of a half century ago does. (Boy, that was one god-awful sentence I just wrote.) "IF" only, Mr. Savage: "IF" only you could look at the "Other" and be more able to better see yourself. . . .