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Friday
With all the recent rightwing assaults on books, it’s good to revisit John F. Kennedy’s Amherst speech in favor of the arts, delivered shortly before he was shot. Since discomfort with independent thinking appears to be a major factor propelling the censors, it’s refreshing to hear from someone who likes it when artists critique our society and call out America for failing to live up to its full potential.
Delivered on Oct. 26, 1963, the talk was in part to honor Robert Frost, who had died earlier in the year. Frost, Kennedy said, “brought an unsparing instinct for reality to bear on the platitudes and pieties of society”:
His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation. “I have been” he wrote, “one acquainted with the night.” And because he knew the midnight as well as the high noon, because he understood the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to overcome despair.
Kennedy goes on to talk about how a poet like Frost challenges power hierarchies, which is why great literature makes rightwing governors like Texas’s Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis so uncomfortable. Kennedy notes that, “at bottom,” Frost
held a deep faith in the spirit of man, and it is hardly an accident that [he] coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.
As we watch authoritarians pervert school curricula, censor libraries, and interfere with reproductive and gender choices, watching someone applaud artists who remain faithful to their “personal vision of reality” is a welcome change. Such an artist, Kenney says, becomes
the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover’s quarrel with the world. In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role. If Robert Frost was much honored in his lifetime, it was because a good many preferred to ignore his darker truths. Yet in retrospect, we see how the artist’s fidelity has strengthened the fiber of our national life.
For a dramatic instance of Frost’s darker truths, it’s worth revisiting “The Road Not Taken” since it’s so frequently misinterpreted. In the past I’ve done a deep dive into the poem so I’ll just mention here that it’s not a self-flattering poem about making daring and unconventional choices. Rather, it exposes how we fool ourselves about past decisions. Wanting to think of ourselves as heroic individualists, we tell ourselves we took the less-worn path but have to admit, in retrospect, that the two paths were “really about the same.” Frost, in other words, is dismantling a key American myth.
Back to Kennedy’s speech, which goes on to have a message for those Florida and Texas censors who are banning works by Toni Morrison, Khaled Hosseini, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Isabel Allende, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sandra Cisneros, Maya Angelou, and John Irving (among many others) while expurgating Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth:
If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.
Really, Kennedy’s speech should be required reading for everyone engaged in education and civic life since it doesn’t hold back. Continuing on in the same vein, Kennedy says,
If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.
And:
In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society–in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man, the fate of having “nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.”
I’d like to see “art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth” above every library—and plastered in every literature classroom—in America. The problem with the MAGA right is that they aren’t about to let the chips “fall where they may.” They want to control kids rather than allow them to search for truth. Choosing sterility because its feels safe to them, they shortchange the nation in the process.
Towards the end of his talk, Kennedy says,
I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens.
There are currently forces at work in our country seeking just the opposite—and all too often getting their way.