From Drudge:
Paglia challenges: “At this time of foreboding about the future of Western culture, it is crucial to identify and preserve our finest artifacts… As a student of ancient empires, I am uncertain about whether the West’s chaotic personalism can prevail against the totalizing creeds that menace it. Hence it is important that we reinforce the spiritual values of Western art, however we define them.”
Her new book is directed toward BOTH ends of the political/cultural spectrum. Paglia has selected religious poems in it (Donne, Herbert), as well as radical poems of social protest (Blake, Whitman). From canonical Renaissance verse to Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock, there are poems about the all-devouring maelstrom of politics (Yeats) and also about the awesome vastness of nature and the cosmosess.
[The ENTIRE poetry establishment, all the honored, famous, adulated major living poets are excluded from the book! Poet laureates, Nobel prize winners teaching at Harvard, none of their poems made the cut; Paglia’s choices of contemporary poets are obscure or unknown.] “Paglia argues that critics can no longer read, poets can no longer write, and the unacknowledged legislators of our age are writing advertising jingles for peanuts,” the LONDON TELEGRAPH says of BREAK BLOW BURN.
Excellent! Good to see Miss Paglia finally back in action. I’m not sure she fully recognizes from whence the totalitiarian creeds spring – economics and politics have never been her strong suit – but I find her to be the most intriguing intellectual figure of our time.