It is no wonder that Obama’s campaign slogan, “We are the hope that we’ve been waiting for,” appeals to adolescents. On the Huffington Post, where about a quarter of contributors appear to be at other times engaged in creative writing, a poet collected some “found poetry” from the Obama campaign trail. (“Found poetry” is a hot genre right now. I learned how to do it in a workshop where we were asked to randomly circle phrases from various newspapers and magazines and then string them together. You can also do it at home with word kitchen magnets.) The swooning Obama fans have been brought up by teachers who have told them that they are all little geniuses who just need to get together into little groups to solve the problems of the planet (while circling the right bubbles for answers on multiculturalism). Why would the junior Senator’s lack of experience concern such voters? After all, they have gotten into their little “groups” and “brainstormed” on such issues as global warming and world hunger and have come up with solutions that pleased their fourth-grade teachers. At the same time they have not had to bother studying the great works of Western civilization and or to learn old-style “linear” thinking--or logic. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama got his idea from some fourth-grade teacher preparing her class for a mock UN debate and telling her charges, “You are the hope you’ve been waiting for.”

When the tykes get to college things won’t be any better for they’ll be exposed to the same dogma and teaching methods. Not many will read Allen Tate, that old dead white guy who dared to write poem titled “Ode to the Confederate Dead” and who referred to the “Man of Letters.” Robert Penn Warren too is out of fashion. The educational system also has succeeded in wiping out positive traces of Western culture to ensure that undergraduates recognize no allusions.

It’s a pity, for a solid grounding in poetry would help young people recognize demagoguery. Warren’s poem “Infant Boy at Midcentury” (1956) expresses no particular event or politician but has the effect of being relevant to the current situation. Writing of his son’s birth, Warren states,

You enter at the hour when the dog returns to his vomit,
And fear’s moonflower spreads, white as girl-thigh, in dusk of compromise;
When posing for pictures, arms linked, the same smile in their eyes,
Good and Evil, to iron out all differences, stage their meeting at summit.

Obama’s promise to meet with our enemies, anyone?

Warren, of course, diagnoses his age’s growing acceptance of relativism. It would be well to revisit such poetry whose lasting power resides in its refusal to indict the particularly unpopular politics of the moment, but instead focuses on ideas, or verities, if you will. It would be well to tell college sophomores that the reference to the dog returning to his vomit comes from Proverbs, a very, very old “text” indeed. (“As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly” Proverbs 26:11). At both community colleges and prestigious universities, the overwhelming majority of students have no clue where Warren got this line. (But over the years, I’ve noticed that, as such Biblical allusions become more foreign to students, anthology editors conspire to keep them in the dark by taking out explanatory footnotes.) In the age of relativism, in the age when our young people have been indoctrinated to believe that talking is all that is needed and that people of color hold a special virtue, the grim irony of Warren’s presentation of the meeting of Good and Evil is needed more than ever.