Poetry and the Free Market

To the Editors:

Bruce Bawer (“Columbia's Assault on the American Novel,”\December 1991) might be less hysterical if he would reflect upon Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz's comments in “Poetry and the Free Market” (The New York Times Book Review, December 8, 1991). Bawer apparently cannot distinguish between Stalinist political terrorism and the benign and ancient socialist efforts to ameliorate the inevitable inequities of unregulated market forces.

As Paz writes, “Recently I have been recalling, not without sadness, the struggles that certain of us poets, writers and artists have waged for many years and in different countries. In my youth, the struggle against 'socialist realism', a doctrine that subjected literature to the dictates of a state and a party that, in the name of the liberation of mankind, was erecting monuments to the whip and the boot. . . ....

 

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