Are poems dangerous? It appears that if they threaten the ikons of the left they are. It is perfectly reasonable to have pictures of decapitation of the current president or portray him as Caesar in Shakespeare in the park, but writing a poem can apparently be felonious.
Given social media has many threats about many politicians, it appears that poems have more weight.
A Kentucky man who acknowledged threatening President Barack Obama in a poem has been sentenced to nearly three years in prison.
Johnny Logan Spencer apologized for writing the poem, which described a fatal sniper shooting of the president.
The 28-year-old said in federal court in Louisville on Monday that he was upset about his mother’s death and had fallen in with a white supremacist group that had helped him kick a drug habit.
U.S. District Judge Joseph H. McKinley Jr. called Spencer’s writing of the poem an extremely dangerous thing. Spencer will be on supervised release for three years after he completes the 33-month sentence.
The poem, titled “The Sniper,” was posted on a website in 2007 and again in 2009 after Obama took office.
I consider poems are dangerously subversive. Consider this, which destroys the idea of romantic love, seeing it as merely power. Written in the Restoration. By a woman.
A Thousand Martyrs I Have Made
A thousand Martyrs I have made,
All sacrific’d to my desire;
A thousand Beauties have betray’d,
That languish in resistless Fire.
The untam’d Heart to hand I brought,
And fixt the wild and wandring Thought.I never vow’d nor sigh’d in vain
But both, thô false, were well receiv’d.
The Fair are pleas’d to give us pain,
And what they wish is soon believ’d.
And thô I talked of Wounds and Smart,
Loves Pleasures only toucht my Heart.Alone the Glory and the Spoil
I always Laughing bore away;
The Triumphs, without Pain or Toil,
Without the Hell, the Heav’n of Joy.
And while I thus at random rove
Despise the Fools that whine for Love.Aphra Behn
Or this, that predates the Sophists of postmodernism, and Shakespeare.
There is no truth of any good
To be discerned on earth ; and, by conversion,
Nought therefore simply bad; but as the stuff
Prepared for Arras pictures, is no picture
Till it be formed, and man hath cast the beams
Of his imaginous fancy thorough it,
In forming ancient kings and conquerors
As he conceives they looked and were attired,
Though they were nothing so: so all things here
Have all their price set down from men’s conceits,
Which make all terms and actions good or bad,
And are but pliant and well-coloured threads
Put into feigned images of truth.George Chapman
Poems are dangerous. For they suggest that the verities of this time are false, or fungible, or suppress the desires of the heart. They can deny reality.
But praise God. The idea that the poets are the legislators of this time was a metaphor for the revolutionary Byron, but now is just another poetic fantasy.