Just for a moment I was back at schoolnAnd felt that old familiar pain,nAnd as I turned to make my way back homenThe snow turned into rain.nWhat makes Dan Fogelberg not a poet? There are severalnreasons. For one thing, his verses have rhyme and rhythmn(strike one); for another, they make sense (strike two); andnfinally, they are addressed to the experiences of ordinarynAmericans (three strikes and you’re out). There is an easynrule of thumb in these matters: art and poetry are eithernforeign or at least, like John Ashbery, unintelligible.nIf there is a popular audience for music and poetry, younwill not find them watching stale productions of Verdi onnLive at the Met (PBS), where the camera zooms in so closenthat even Placido Domingo looks like a bloated frog. No,nthe true lovers of music and poetry are probably drinkingnbeer in a stadium somewhere, watching Merle Haggard singn”I’ll just sit here and drink” or his anti-utopian masterpiece,n”Rainbow Stew”—nWhen a President walks through the White HousendoornAnd does what he says he’ll donWe’ll all be drinking that free bubble-upnAnd eating that rainbow stew.nIt’s not exactly Richard Strauss or even Thomas Campion.nOn the other hand, it’s not Ned Rorem either—ornwhatever other prissy little composer of “art songs” happensnto be in these days.nIn a discussion of contemporary art, we have to eliminatenthe “classics” and stick to what is being written today—or atnleast in recent memory. A quick look at the scene is enoughnto convince almost anyone that we are headed for a sort ofncultural showdown between the culture snobs, who arenpushing the heirs of Arnold Schoenberg and Ezra Pound,nand the culture slobs, who would rather see Hank WilliamsnJr. take off his shirt and sing “All my rowdy friends havensettled down.”nThe snobs do have a point. There is a complexity, ansolemnity, a spirituality about Bach and Milton that isnlargely absent from American popular culture. (But wherendo we find it in high culture?) Even granting a certainncleverness—or even artfulness—to songwriters like BobnDylan, Lou Reed, and Bocephus, their compositions arennot characteristic of the commercial trash usually played onnthe radio. Besides, at their best, popular songs rarely risenabove the level of a folk art: they are more on the level ofncrewelwork than painting or sculpture.nAll that is true. But note the distinction that is usuallynmade between “authentic” songwriters like Hank Williamsn(Sr.) or Bob Dylan and the commercial hacks who grind outnsongs for the record companies. A genuine artist, at least innthe popular sphere, is someone who comes out of a certainncommunity, a certain tradition. Dylan consciously set outnto make himself the heir of Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston,nand a folk musician as inauthenhc as himself. RamblingnJack Elliot. Although that doesn’t make Dylan “thenreal thing”—any more than Woody Guthrie, a middleclassnDJ, was the real thing—it does show that his heart’s innthe right place. If popular artists, to be authentic, arenexpected somehow to represent a community or a tradition,nwhy not serious artists?nIn fact, the reverse is true. What we actually observe isnthe tyranny of highbrow artists who have one hand in thentaxpayers’ pocket, while the other hand is holding a knifenready to stick it in their backs. For some time now artists (Inuse the word in its generic sense) have exulted in theirnisolation and alienation from everything the rest of usnperceive as normal, wholesome, or American. The best ofnthem, like Henry James and T. S. Eliot, abandoned theirncountry to become artificial Englishmen. More typical wasnEzra Pound, who ended up in Italy defending the “real”nAmerica against the false version that happened to benengaged in a war against his adopted country.nPound had his merits and in his own way loved hisncountry, but his spiritual descendants do not even have thengrace to leave. At the same time they are insulting us,nalmost in the same breath they tell us it is our duty tonsupport them “for our own good.” As Patience explained tonthe poet, “No, Mr. Bunthorne, you’re wrong again.” ThenState Department does a good enough job of subsidizing thenenemies of America abroad; we don’t need the NationalnEndowments and state arts councils to do the same thing atnhome.nThere is no reason to be surprised at the attitude of artists.nIt is symptomatic of a widespread refusal to accept thenconsequences of our behavior. Did you break the law,ndesert the army, flee the draft, and go to Canada? Well,nyour motives were pure: come home, all is forgiven. Fornsome reason, though, it works with criminals; it doesn’tnwith artists. Perhaps it is because we dimly realize that truenart, including the greatest masterpieces, nearly alwaysnemerges from communities. Despite all the romanticnmyths, it is almost never the product of an isolated genius innrebellion against his people. The Iliad and Odyssey—likenthe great English and Scottish ballads—grew out of a folkntradition; and Shakespeare, who for all his faults is the bestnwe have in English, turned his back on the alien pseudoclassicismnof the university wits (even then the colleges werendestroying literary talent) and reached out to the ordinarynEnglishmen of his time. In more recent times more thannone major writer has felt compelled to return to his rootsnin rural society—Thomas Hardy no less than WilliamnFaulkner.nBut it is not just rural societies that have communitynidentity. The great urban civilizations of Athens, Rome,nand the Italian city-states of the Renaissance were provincialncultures in the sense that they were self-centered andnxenophobic, doggedly antieosmopolitan. Of course theynwere international to some extent. They had to be. ThenItalians leaned heavily upon Latin (and French) literaryntraditions, the Romans upon the Greeks. But the greatestnRoman writers—Livy, Juvenal, and especially Vergiln—were thoroughly Roman and devoted their talents toncelebrating “the long glories of majestic Rome.” When theyncriticized, it was from the inside, as a participating membernof society.nCosmopolitanism is the death of serious art. WhennEnglish dramatists learned to turn their backs on Shakespearenand Jonson and to run after Racine and Moliere, itn(continued on page 20)nnnOCTOBER 1985/5n