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With Respect To John Milton
. . . that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem; that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things . . . the experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy.
---John Milton, Apology For Smectymnuus
On the morning of Monday, October 13th, 1975, I resolved to become a Poet. During the weekend immediately previous, the person whom I believed I loved flatly and coldly rejected my feelings of affection. I spent both Saturday and Sunday afternoons riding my bike over twenty-miles, up and down our dead end street, each day. Alone wiith my thoughts during those rides, I realize that the horror and science fiction stories to which I, then, had aspired (since my eighth grade year) were constitutionally unable to assist me in expressing both this love that I felt and the subsequent frustration when it was flung back in my teeth. Only Poetry could help with that. Having made that resolution at about 8am on the morning of the 13th, I began immediately to study the Poetry of John Milton; I began that, literally, before even informing my parents of my decision at dinner that evening. (Their shocked silence and aghast faces, after I told them, was one of the highlights of my Senior year in High School. In my parents' perspective on reality, Poetry, communism, and homosexuality were part of a triangle of subversion; and they were convinced that a person could embrace one of those three aspects without at least embracing one of the remaining two, if not both. I think they spent all of my Senior year wondering if another shoe, or even two other shoes, might also drop; but I did not give them the satisfaction of having thier doubts or question assuaged. During the following summer, of 1976, they added to that trinagle, a fourth situation to convert the pattern to a square: that of participating in the c.b. radio craze---of which I did given them ample confirmation, which they received with the most livid attitude.)
My Mentor during my Senior Year, and thereafter, gave me the quotation from Milton which I have reproduced above as the epigraph to this essay; and she advised me to make sure that I navigated my entire career in Poetry---whenever that was to commence---by that quotation. While I have not always lived up to it successfully (I am very well aware of my faults, flaws and failings), it remains as my goal, perhaps moreso now at this stage (which I consider to be the last) of my life.
This brings me back to something I have noticed on PostPoems and which I want to again address. Several people who post to this site seem to ignore comments that they receive. Whether out of careless oncompetence, or deliberate discourtesy, comments on their poems are ignored. I cannot quite wrap my mind around this. I admit to failing to respond to a comment in a timely way, and when I discover such a failure on my part, it makes me almost sick.
But some people who post to this site apparently decline to respond to any comments they reach. Ironically, one of them also wrote that, when he failed to post any poems for sometimes, no one inquired if he was alright or if some crisis had intervened to prevent him from posting. He, whose entire gallery of poems shows not one single reply to a reader's comment still expected others to notice his temporary absence, during that one period, and to inquire of him about it. Could anything be more hypocritical?
So, rather than continuing to rant about it, I think the correct conclusion should be this: keeping Milton's advice, above, in mind, one must assume that a true Poet does respond to readers' comments, at least to acknowledge them. Those posters who deliberately refuse to do so cannot be consider, at least in my opinion, to be true Poets. While I believe the deliberate failure to acknowledge comments on a consistent basis is immoral, disrespectful and discourteous, it is also useful in provide a standard that separates the true Poets from the . . . well, rather than use my first choice of words, I will just say, from those who are not.
Starward
