The Promised Land Project: The Modern Era and the Misanthropic

Turning Vision into Action....at least hypothetically

Strike up the music of the band
We're blazing a trail for the promised land
Heaven on earth is within you.

Through the writing of stories, poetry, essays, and a novel, I’ve creatively contended with the consumer culture and the problem of the ideal in the modern era. This preoccupation in time would lead to a vision of cultural transformation and where I believe our democratic society needs to go to truly progress beyond the modern era. Conceding my limited credibility, this blog provides a synthesis of recognized visionaries, poets, and writers with the objective of making a credible argument. Ultimately, it is a certain feeling the project strives to inspire and sustain on a certain level, making more vital use of poetry and the arts; consequently whether one agrees or not is less important than whether one senses it and feels it over time.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

The Modern Era and the Misanthropic

In the preceeding blogs, I wrote how the poetry of high modernism reflects the rise of a misanthropic age in the aftermath of the First World War. Yet its roots can be traced to the onset of the modern era in Europe. The exalting of art in poetry in part becomes spurred by the misanthropic impulse. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, writing in his book, Mallarme, or the Poet of Nothingness, cites its incarnation in the ensuing repercussions of the fall of the monarchy -- as the king was believed to have led by divine right -- and the rise of bourgeois ideology of reason. Following the fall of the monarchy and the failed revolution of 1848 when the bourgeoisie asserts itself to dominate the social order, Sartre describes the situation as follows:

The wrath of the poets was awesome. The most violent immediately proclaimed their hatred of Man, that impostor whose grievous fault consisted in not being the son of God. Flaubert set things in motion: “Without ever having, thank God, suffered at their hand, I loathe my fellow beings.” But Leconte de Lisle went even further, and in a state of great agitation wrote:

Man, heir of man and of his accrued evils
With your dead planet and your vanished Gods,
Fly away, vile dust…

Yet at roughly the same time something quite different is taking place in the poetic genius in America. While in Europe, human beings have fallen from grace and are no longer cast in the image of God, across the Atlantic Whitman is asserting the divine in the average working man and woman in such poems as "Song of Myself".