'social relevance for poetry'

The Australian poet Michael Thwaites, who died at the age of 90 in 2005, worked for Australia's security intelligence organisation (ASIO) for twenty years.  After his WWII naval service he lectured for three years at Melbourne University and then received a recruitment call from ASIO's director-general Charles Spry:
"You write poetry, I know. Much of the job will just be hard methodical work but imagination is also needed. I believe you could make a valuable contribution."
   

http://michael.thwaites.com.au/

digital.slv.vic.gov.au/dtl_publish/pdf/marc/23/1011391.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2005/nov/18/guardianobituaries.australia

'every poet and every artist is an anti-social being'

"The point is, art is something subversive. It's something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things one must steal, to be used against the established order. Once art becomes official and open to everyone, then it becomes the new academicism."

"If art is ever given the keys to the city, it will be because it's been so watered down, rendered so impotent, that it's not worth fighting for."

"And why did Plato say poets should be chased out of the republic? Precisely because every poet and every artist is an anti-social being. He's not that way because he wants to be ...
the right to free expression is something one seizes, not something one is given. It isn't a principle one can lay down as something that should exist ...
If the idea of society is to dominate the idea of the individual, the individual must perish. Furthermore, there wouldn't be such a thing as a seer if there weren't a state trying to suppress him. It's only at that moment, under that pressure, that he becomes one. People reach the status of artist only after crossing the maximum number of barriers. So the arts should be discouraged, not encouraged."

p. 189
'Life with Picasso'
Francoise Gilot & Carlton Lake, 1964, Thomas Nelson

'The Angry Genius of Les Murray'

"Though he has at various times held university fellowships, Murray has little good to say about what goes on in the literature classroom. Academic literary critics are, to him, heirs of an Enlightenment hostile to the creative spirit. Behind its mask of the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, he sees the Enlightenment itself as a cabal of rootless, disaffected clercs scheming to grasp power, usually by controlling the fashion for what may or may not be said in public ('political correctness'). Universities have been turned by the Enlightenment into 'humiliation mills' that grind out generations of students ashamed of their social origins, alienated from their native culture, recruits to a new metropolitan class whose Australian manifestation Murray dubs 'the Ascendancy.' The term is meant to capture both the 'foreign-derived oppressiveness' of the new class and its 'arriviste, first-generation flavour.' The Ascendancy is 'the natural upper class of a socialist world order'; holding a university degree is the modern equivalent of being a landowner."
p. 139
The Best Australian Essays 2012, Black Inc.
J. M. Coetzee, 'Les Murray and the Black Dog'
first appeared as 'The Angry Genius of Les Murray' in New York Review of Books, 29 September 2011