Poetry, Humanism, and “Political Man”

American Samizdat

An Indian poet seated in a cherry blossom garden. Painted during the reign of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, 1628-1658 (Public domain)

“This summer, you've struck me as being a bit like a 17th-century English poet, retired to his garden to write and reflect, who one day hears outside the walls the clamour of civil strife and so re-enters the public fray.”

The always eloquent and erudite essayist of the English Republic of Letters, Jeffrey Streeter, alerting me to my feelings before I knew them.

In his historic 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr. offers not any kind of technical, philosophical definition of just law but rather several different illustrations of such law, seeking, as it were, to find its coordinates, as if exchanging instruments on a surveyor’s tripod. My favorite, the most humanistically essential, tells us: “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

It is the essential evil of fascism — includin…