Welcome back to Great Americans, a countdown to our country’s 250th birthday. We’re bringing you a writer we love on an American they love, every weekday between now and July 4. Previously, Matthew Walther paid tribute to Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court justice who went from pitching hay on a farm to prosecuting Nazis in Nuremberg. Today, David Mamet remembers Paul Dresser, the songwriter from Indiana who gave America its first great pop hit and, some would say, its first great poem. —The Editors
The randomized verbiage and punctuation—that drivel passing today as poetry—is fruit of the poisoned tree. The tree was Walt Whitman.
He wrote “I Hear America Singing” in self-congratulation, mistaking the ability to feel for a license to create. His writing is poetry only by courtesy—its success not aesthetic, but political; a generous offer of the democratization of aesthetics: “I feel things; perhaps you do too. If you endorse this trash, then we are one—thus you too must be something of a poet.”
Carl Sandburg, ee cummings, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and the Beats weren’t bad poets; they weren’t poets at all. You disagree? Quote me some. But we hear lines of Yeats or Shakespeare, the two greatest English-language poets, and we remember them. Of course we do, for their poems are songs. And songs are written for the ear—remembered as they can be sung.
