THE POLITICAL AFTER 1936
My poetry is political in the sense that George Orwell used the word. He used the word political in the widest possible sense. By political purpose in writing Orwell meant “the desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.” “Once again,” Orwell went on, “no book is genuinely free from political bias.”1 Even the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
Orwell was in his early thirties when his specific political-literary orientation began to take shape. “The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale,” he said, “and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.” -Ron Price with thanks to 1George Orwell, “Why I Write,” 1947 at The Political Writings of George Orwell Internet Site, 2006.
You said it well, George,
after ten years of practice
of your art.1 It took me 40
years on some sinuous line
to make my work into an art.2
My starting point was a very
different partisanship, you
might call it a spiritual view,
some facts to which I want
to draw attention, to expose
some false consciousness,
to get a hearing, to find some
space in the public view.
I, like you, am driven on
by some demon whom I
can not resist or understand.
But political purpose is at
the base of my literary vitality.
Were it not for this energy
my writing would be lifeless,
betrayed into purple passages,
sentences without meaning,
decorative adjectives and humbug.
1 1936/7-1946/7 2 15 to 55: 1959 to 1999 --Ron Price June 12th 2006
My poetry is political in the sense that George Orwell used the word. He used the word political in the widest possible sense. By political purpose in writing Orwell meant “the desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.” “Once again,” Orwell went on, “no book is genuinely free from political bias.”1 Even the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
Orwell was in his early thirties when his specific political-literary orientation began to take shape. “The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale,” he said, “and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.” -Ron Price with thanks to 1George Orwell, “Why I Write,” 1947 at The Political Writings of George Orwell Internet Site, 2006.
You said it well, George,
after ten years of practice
of your art.1 It took me 40
years on some sinuous line
to make my work into an art.2
My starting point was a very
different partisanship, you
might call it a spiritual view,
some facts to which I want
to draw attention, to expose
some false consciousness,
to get a hearing, to find some
space in the public view.
I, like you, am driven on
by some demon whom I
can not resist or understand.
But political purpose is at
the base of my literary vitality.
Were it not for this energy
my writing would be lifeless,
betrayed into purple passages,
sentences without meaning,
decorative adjectives and humbug.
1 1936/7-1946/7 2 15 to 55: 1959 to 1999 --Ron Price June 12th 2006