Indeed …

… Politics Ruins Poetry, and the Resistance Is Proof. Political Poetry Should Not Destroy the Beauty of Real Poems.

A recent and conspicuous instance of the lamentable fusion between poetry and politics comes from Michael Finch, chief operating officer of the dynamic conservative webzine FrontPage Magazine, whose first book of poetry, Finding Home, was released in July 2015. An attempt to recapture the essence and feeling of a lost America, the intention is noble but the poetry is moribund. True, the poems deal largely with landscape and reminiscence, but the meander is clearly political. Consider lines like “Accounts are kept, mercy not spared for the/Murdering Umma or the self-righteous West” and “a false god of equality and a radical/Creed that drove utopia hard and ended all free men,” among many others. This is not poetry—not even bad poetry—but prose assertion, dispatches from the culture wars. Prosody and metaphor have predictably succumbed to the didacticism of a political message.