Our nation’s in crisis and doesn’t even know it.

“What are you talking about, Lance, of course they–”

Not like that. The moment you ruin funding for the arts, the moment music becomes an elective, the moment you have more copywriters than poets, you start down into absurdity.

The poets are always the first to go. It happened in Plato’s time, much as I like Plato’s thought. Plato kicked all of the poets and storytellers out of Greece because he was afraid of their power. We’ve no room for storytellers or poets these days.

I first noticed it when I read G.K. Chesterton’s Utopia of Userers:

Most people have seen a picture called “Bubbles,” which is used for the advertisement of celebrated soap… Anyone with an instinct for design will see that the cake of soap destroys the picture as a picture… Michael Angelo may have been proud to have helped an emperor or a pope; though, indeed, I think he was prouder than they were on his account. I do not believe Sir John Millais was proud of having helped a soap-boiler. I do not say he thought it wrong; but he was not proud of it….

I should say the first effect of the triumph of the capitalist (if we allow him to triumph) will be that that line of demarcation will entirely disappear. There will be no art that might not just as well be advertisement. I do not necessarily mean that there will be no good art; much of it might be, much of it already is, very good art. You may put it, if you please, in the form that there has been vast improvement in advertisements….

But the improvement of advertisements is the degradation of artists. It is their degradation for this clear and vital reason: that the artist will work, not only to please the rich, but only to increase their riches; which is a considerable step lower.

I try, when I can, to shy away from copywriting. Oh, sure, it’s one thing to help a friend or acquaintance with the phrasing of their website, but quite another to sell MacBooks. For copywriting is prostitution of the worst kind (as is corporate art). In copywriting, we writers not only accept money for mingling with the body of another, but we deal in Faustian terms as well, selling our souls. In this, selling our soul to the body of another, we commit a crime both spiritual and physical. Were I some demon, we might very well call this a possession. And we find that’s exactly what advertisement art is: art made to sell more possessions.

So it doesn’t surprise me that our poets were the first to go, they always are. Writers these days must keep a significant reserve of personal dignity on hand to brave the scoffing that follows the phrase, “I write for a living.” The same could be said of painters, embroiderers, comedians and the rest. We live in a culture where the arts are not crafts that elevate our eyes toward the divine, but things we look down upon, juvenile delinquencies and delusions of grandeur. What happened to the time when “starving artist” was an oxymoron?

For popes and kings once commissioned poets to sit in their courts and compose. Poetry–to do with words what painters do with pigment–could be heard within a stones throw. But here, we must either go to academia or to the alleys where artists starve to find the poets, the painters, the real songs. All else is copy.

I refuse to stop there. I read poetry because there was an age where that sort of thing was common, not weird or misunderstood. Do I always understand the poems I read? Of course not, but art’s not about rapture, some Eureka moment of adrenaline and endorphins. Art’s about creating the sort of life, over the long haul, that delights in noticing the wonder all around us.

So find her starving in the alleys, shaken, needing a cup of cold water. Find her and hear her story, for poetry (in specific) and art (in general) suffered a near-death experience over the last fifty years.

You’d do well to shut up and listen to her.