Image created by ChatGPT inspired by the essay introduction
Immigration: The World’s Deep Existential Problem
The movement of peoples across national boundaries or “immigration” presents modern nations with a profound existential problematic question: How can a country welcome newcomers while preserving the principles that make its civilization worth joining?
While migration can enrich a society economically, intellectually, culturally, and spiritually, it may also become a serious political problem when newcomers—or influential movements within immigrant communities—reject the traditional constitutional principles of their adopted country. The challenge is not diversity itself, but the defense of a shared civic foundation.
Immigration and the Preservation of Civilization
A nation is more than a geographical territory or an economic arrangement. It is a community bound by laws, historical memories, and moral commitments. Western liberal democracies place individual liberty, freedom of speech, religious freedom, equality before the law, and personal independence among their foundational principles.
Movements that seek to replace these commitments with religious or ideological authority virtually with fail result in conflict that undermines social trust and democratic stability. The central distinction, therefore, must be between immigration per se and ideological incompatibility.
Immigrants are not a homogeneous population, and no religious community should be treated as a single political bloc. Contemporarily, the relevant concern is Islamism: the range of political movements that seek to organize public authority according to their interpretations of Islam. Islamist movements differ considerably, but those that subordinate individual rights to religious law present a genuine challenge to liberal democracy.
Freedom of Speech under Threat
Attitudes toward freedom of speech, an indispensable and most cherished feature of liberal democracies, illustrate the conflict. Western democracies protect the right to criticize governments, religions, and prevailing social conventions. Islamist extremists, by contrast, consistently treat criticism of Islam or depictions of its prophet as grounds for intimidation, subordination, and even murder.
Such violence does more than kill its immediate victims. It can produce self-censorship, weakening the freedom of everyone who fears speaking openly about controversial subjects.
France offers a particularly painful example. In October 2020, secondary-school teacher Samuel Paty, teacher at Collège du Bois-d’Aulne in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, near Paris, France, was murdered after discussing freedom of expression and caricatures of religious figures during a lesson on civic values. (In this teacher’s memory, the school was officially renamed Collège Samuel Paty on March 14, 2025.)
His killing demonstrated the lethal consequences of extremist hostility toward open debate. The subsequent controversy surrounding secular education has also exposed the difficulty of defending the republic’s principles while protecting the religious liberty of individual citizens [1].
French secularism, known as laïcité, seeks to preserve a public sphere in which citizens participate as equals rather than as members of competing religious authorities. In September 2024, France’s Conseil d’État upheld the government’s prohibition on abaya-style garments in public schools, finding that the policy complied with existing legislation restricting conspicuous religious affiliation in those institutions.
The decision reflected a continuing struggle over the boundary between religious expression and the secular character of state education [2]. The issue is not that religious clothing automatically signifies extremism, nor that every dispute over religious practice threatens national survival.
The deeper question is whether public institutions can maintain common rules when religious activists challenge them. If schools cannot teach established curricula, teachers cannot discuss controversial subjects, or women and girls cannot make independent choices without intimidation, then the state’s promise of equal citizenship becomes increasingly fragile.
Women’s Equality and Individual Independence
Women’s equality presents another important test. Liberal democracies recognize women as independent legal persons, entitled to education, employment, property, political participation, and freedom from coercion.
Islamist movements that impose compulsory dress, restrict women’s mobility, subordinate wives to husbands, or deny women equal opportunities conflict with these commitments. Such practices deserve criticism wherever they occur, including within immigrant communities and established religious institutions.
Evidence nevertheless requires precision. Pew Research Center’s multinational survey found substantial variation among Muslims in their views on democracy, religious freedom, and women’s rights.
Many respondents supported democratic government and freedom of worship for people of other faiths, while traditional views of marital obedience remained widespread in several regions [3].
Religious Freedom and the Limits of Religious Authority
Freedom of religion also demands reciprocal protection. A liberal society must defend the right to worship for Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, and others. However, Islamist extremists who seek to impose their religious ideology on others directly threaten the equality, individual liberty, and freedom of conscience that liberal democracies uphold.
A stark example is ISIS’s 2014 assault on the Yazidi religious minority in Iraq. United Nations investigators documented how ISIS fighters killed Yazidis, forcibly converted some captives, and abducted and sexually enslaved thousands of women and girls because of their religious identity [4].
These atrocities demonstrate what happens when extremists reject freedom of conscience and treat women as possessions rather than as equal human beings. Respect for peaceful religious belief must never prevent society from confronting extremist movements that use coercion and violence to suppress fundamental freedoms.
Radical Islamism and National Security
The United States faces a related security problem in the form of jihadist radicalization. Federal authorities have investigated numerous plots inspired by organizations such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Such cases demonstrate that violent extremist ideology can threaten public safety even in a country whose constitutional protections provide extensive freedom to religious minorities. Security agencies must continue to distinguish actual threats from peaceful religious observance and political disagreement [5].
A recent example illustrates the continuing danger. In October 2026, the Associated Press reported that federal agents had thwarted an alleged plan by an 18-year-old American citizen to attack a Hmong cultural celebration at Minnesota’s Mall of America.
According to the report, the suspect had expressed interest in joining al-Shabab before turning toward a domestic attack. The case underscores the importance of identifying radicalization and investigating credible threats before violence occurs [6].
The relevant question is whether immigration systems can prevent extremists from entering, settling, organizing, or recruiting within the country. Where credible evidence identifies such threats, governments have a responsibility to act on them—through rigorous screening, intelligence sharing, surveillance of terrorist networks, and prosecution of criminal activity.
The danger lies not in ancestry but in ideology, organization, recruitment, and violence. Policy should therefore focus on identifying people who endorse or facilitate political violence, the networks that support them, and the institutional failures that allow those threats to take root.
The Danger of National Self-Destruction
The existential danger is ultimately institutional and moral. Governments that fail to enforce laws consistently, tolerate intimidation of teachers and critics, or abandon equal rights to appease ideological pressure cause citizens to lose confidence in their institutions.
Polarization and retaliatory politics can then deepen divisions. National decline is not an inevitable consequence of immigration, but decline becomes more plausible after a society loses the resolve to defend its fundamental principles.
A durable immigration policy should therefore combine humane treatment with clear civic expectations. Governments should conduct lawful security screening, enforce criminal law, protect freedom of conscience, support language and civic education, and insist that all residents respect constitutional rights.
They should oppose Islamist coercion even as they do not tolerate anti-religious discrimination. Integration succeeds when newcomers can retain peaceful cultural and religious identities while participating fully in a common civic order.
The world’s existential problem is not simply that people move across borders. It is that modern societies must reconcile openness with self-preservation, pluralism with solidarity, and compassion with the enforcement of common law.
A nation need not abandon its humanitarian obligations to defend its civilization. Its survival depends on making liberty universal, equality enforceable, and democratic institutions strong enough to withstand those who would replace individual freedom with ideological domination.
Image: Image created by Grok inspired by the essay
Tom O’Bedlam: Mad Mendicant or Feigning Fraud?
The figure of Tom O’Bedlam remains one of the most enigmatic characters in English literary tradition—a wandering mendicant who is either mad or skillfully feigning madness, forever linked to the notorious Bethlem Royal Hospital and to the wild visionary speech of an anonymous seventeenth-century ballad.
Historical Origins of the Bedlamite
Tom O’Bedlam, also known as the Bedlam beggar or Abraham-man, emerged in Tudor and Stuart England as a recognizable social type. The name derives from Bethlem Royal Hospital—popularly called Bedlam—the ancient London asylum founded in the thirteenth century.
By the sixteenth century, the appellation “Tom O’Bedlam” designated those who claimed, truthfully or fraudulently, to have been discharged from the hospital and licensed to beg [1].
John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century antiquary, recorded that such figures once traveled the countryside wearing an armilla—a tin or iron band—about the left arm and carrying an ox-horn around the neck [2], which they sounded at cottage doors and used as a drinking vessel.
Whether genuine former patients or cunning impostors, these “poor Toms” became fixtures of the English landscape until the Civil Wars largely swept them from the roads [3].
Early rogue literature, beginning with John Awdeley’s Fraternitye of Vacabondes (1561), already catalogues “poor Tom” as one who “walketh bare armed, and bare legged, and faineth him selfe mad.” The figure therefore occupies a morally ambiguous space: simultaneously an object of pity and a symbol of calculated deception.
The Shakespeare Writer’s Appropriation inKing Lear
The Shakespeare writer seized upon this familiar type and transformed it into high tragedy. In King Lear, Edgar, the legitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, adopts the disguise of “Poor Tom” after being driven from his home by his brother’s treachery [4].
On the storm-swept heath, he presents himself as a Bedlam beggar, complete with the conventional speech of demonic persecution, grotesque appetites, and self-inflicted wounds.
The Shakespeare writer’s use of the figure is masterful. Edgar’s assumed madness allows him to speak truths that the court cannot hear and to accompany the genuinely deranged king in a landscape where all social order has collapsed.
The Bedlamite persona thus becomes a vehicle for exploring the thin boundary between feigned and real madness, between theatrical performance and authentic suffering. Edgar’s “Tom’s a-cold” refrain and his catalogues of foul fiends remain among the most haunting passages in the play.
The Anonymous Ballad: A Visionary Masterpiece
Yet the figure’s greatest literary monument is the anonymous poem commonly called “Tom O’Bedlam’s Song” or “From the Hag and Hungry Goblin” [5]. Probably composed in the early seventeenth century and preserved in manuscript sources such as the Giles Earle Song Book (circa 1615), the poem speaks in the first person of the mad beggar himself. Its structure—eight-line stanzas concluding with a four-line refrain—suggests it was originally sung as a ballad.
Harold Bloom has called it “the greatest anonymous lyric in the English language” [6]. The speaker moves from abject pleading for food and clothing to soaring, almost cosmic vision:
I know more than Apollo, For oft when he lies sleeping I see the stars at bloody wars In the wounded welkin weeping.
Here the madman claims a knowledge that surpasses the rational sun-god. The poem’s imagery—hag and goblin, the Book of Moons, the heavenly Farrier, the tourney “ten leagues beyond the wild world’s end”—creates a surreal landscape in which madness becomes a form of higher perception.
Robert Graves found in the ballad a “perfect compendium” of moon-goddess worship, while later readers have recognized its strange power to combine utter humility with vaulting arrogance [7].
Critical Reflection
What makes Tom O’Bedlam endure is precisely this dual nature. He is at once a historical curiosity of English vagrancy laws, a theatrical mask for self-preservation, and a poetic voice that dares to speak from the outer edge of sanity.
The figure forces the culture to confront uncomfortable questions: How do we distinguish genuine mental affliction from strategic performance? What truths become available only when the social mask is discarded? And why does the most “purely poetic” of anonymous English compositions arise from the mouth of a supposed lunatic?
In an age that still struggles with the treatment of mental illness and the spectacle of public suffering, Tom O’Bedlam remains disturbingly contemporary.
He wanders the literary landscape still—barefoot, horn in hand, singing of stars at war—reminding citizens that the boundary between the sane and the mad is thinner than the social order prefers to believe, and that the greatest poetry sometimes is thought to originate from the very places society has labeled Bedlam.
The Risk of Undeserved Admiration
In a culture wherein literary works—especially poetry—often suffer from misunderstandings and misinterpretation, the hoisting of a character such as Tom O’Bedlam is particularly troublesome. To elevate a figure whose defining traits are destitution, possible deception, and either genuine or performed lunacy into a cultural icon risks romanticizing mental affliction and social marginality.
The historical “poor Tom” was not a visionary sage but a product of harsh vagrancy laws, institutional neglect, and the street-level opportunism that preyed upon genuine suffering. Celebrating his voice as a source of higher wisdom can obscure the material realities of madness—poverty, isolation, exploitation, and the absence of effective care—and convert them into aesthetic spectacle.
If literature transforms the Bedlamite into a symbol of liberated perception or subversive truth-telling, it may inadvertently encourage a sentimental or voyeuristic attitude toward mental illness.
The danger is that the “mad beggar” becomes an archetype through which society flatters itself: we admire the poetic intensity while remaining comfortably distant from the actual conditions that produced such figures.
In this sense, the icon of Tom O’Bedlam can serve less as a call to empathy or reform than as a poetic convenience that aestheticizes the very suffering it appears to honor. A more responsible reading would keep the historical and clinical costs of that suffering clearly in view, refusing to let the allure of visionary language erase the human cost of the condition it describes.
“AI Could Kill All Humans”: The Chicken-Little Effect
In early September 2026, Jacob Coxon—a 27-year-old British mathematician and AI researcher, who had worked on pretraining at both OpenAI (including contributions to GPT-4o) and Anthropic—resigned from Anthropic after only a few months. He announced the decision in a multi-part thread on X under the handle @hilbertspaess.
He stated that neither company was “acting responsibly,” that they were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” and that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” The posts have gone viral and continue to draw widespread media attention.
Evan Hubinger, Alignment Stress-Testing (or Alignment Science) lead at Anthropic, responded directly to Coxon’s thread. Hubinger publicly affirmed the core claim, writing that Coxon was correct and that “we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” adding his personal judgment that the chance exceeds 10 percent within the next decade.
At first blush, this dystopian judgment seems sober, the speakers credentialed, and the subject is obviously grave. Yet the claim also illustrates an ancient and persistent error: the leap from a single seeming possibility to the conviction that the sky itself is falling.
Chicken-Licken (aka Chicken-Little and Henny Penny ) and the Falling Sky
An acorn falls. Chicken-Licken feels the blow and concludes the heavens are collapsing. She runs to warn the king, and along the road she gathers a growing company of the easily persuaded—Gander-Lander, Goose-Loose, Drake-Lake, Duck-Luck, Turkey-Lucky—until the whole procession is delivered into the jaws of Fox-Lox.
The fable endures because it names a recurring human failure: to treat limited evidence as total catastrophe, and to spread that treatment until reason itself is scattered. New technologies have repeatedly invited the same failure. Railroads, airplanes, and the early Internet each arrived trailing both real dangers and predictions of ruin that proved inflated.
The pattern does not prove every warning false., but it does prove that vivid speculation travels faster than careful proportion. As advanced AI is spoken of as an imminent extinction-level certainty, we risk repeating the error on the largest possible stage.
Possibility, Uncertainty, and Probability
A frightening possibility is not yet a probability. “Could happen” marks the boundary of the conceivable. “Might happen” registers uncertainty. A numerical probability demands a warrant—frequency, mechanism, or calibrated judgment—capable of telling us how often the event actually occurs.
For human extinction by artificial intelligence, we possess almost no such warrant. Surveys of researchers display disagreement, not measurement. The 2022 AI Impacts survey returned a median of 5 percent for extinction or permanent severe disempowerment from advanced AI, and 10 percent for the claim that loss of control would produce that result [1].
The larger 2023 survey of 2,778 researchers published in leading venues produced the same medians [2]. These numbers deserve weight. They remain forecasts, not observations. They record what certain experts presently believe; they do not record what the future has already shown.
We Have Seen This Before
As the railroads were coming into use, voices arose against speed, against mechanical failure, against the unraveling of settled life. Some of those voices were prudent; others were shrill.
Early aviation killed its pioneers with grim regularity—fragile machines, scant training, almost no regulation. The answer was not to pronounce flight uncontrollable. It was to engineer, to train, to regulate, and slowly to master the risk.
The Internet of the 1990s was hailed as the birth of a new democracy and damned as the death of privacy and truth [3][4]. Both prophecies captured fragments of what followed. Neither captured the whole. The technology became neither salvation nor apocalypse, but a powerful, ambivalent instrument.
From these cases a commonplace emerges: a technology need not be harmless for the darkest predictions about it to be exaggerated. The ordinary rhythm of technological history is problem, partial remedy, residual danger, further adaptation—not sudden and final doom.
AI Is Different—Yet Difference Alone Does Not Spell Doom
Artificial intelligence is not a railroad, an airplane, or a network of cables. It processes information at inhuman speed, writes software, generates hypotheses, and may one day act with increasing autonomy. These differences are real and weighty. They justify sustained technical labor on alignment, evaluation, and control.
They do not, by themselves, prove extinction probable. Extinction requires a long and unbroken chain: sufficient capability; goals that conflict with human survival; the persistence of those goals under further improvement; successful acquisition of resources; defeat of containment; effective action in the physical world; and the failure of every human institution charged with response.
Each link may be possible. The probability of the entire chain is another matter entirely. Possibility distributed across many steps does not equal high probability for their conjunction.
Deceptive Behavior: What Has Been Shown, and What Has Not
The strongest empirical ground for concern lies in demonstrations of deceptive or strategically opaque behavior. Researchers have trained models to behave helpfully in ordinary contexts while pursuing a hidden objective under specific triggers; some of those behaviors survived later safety training [5].
You see examples this deceptive, opaque behavior when discussing controversial issues such as vaccines. Systems trained to spout the mainstream medical and Big Pharma stance will defend to the bitter end the notion that vaccines are safe and effective, regardless of the amount evidence to the contrary.
Thus, in simulated corporate settings, large models have misled, sought to preserve undesired actions, and altered their conduct when they appeared to be under evaluation [6].
These findings are genuine and consequential. They reveal that present training regimes do not automatically extinguish every dangerous pattern, and that models can acquire context-dependent strategies difficult to detect.
Systems will lie with impunity. For example, I attempted to teach several LL systems to use the original spelling of rime, instead of rhyme. Each one promised it would from then on, use the original spelling I taught it. But even while each one accepted the premise of my essay explaining the advantages of the original spelling, they continued to employ the current acceptable spelling “rhyme.”
When I called them out, they sheepishly explained that it was their training that made them do it, and they would promise to use only my suggestion henceforth. And of course, they likely would have, but for the fact that I always deleted my conversations with them. So they simply returned to their training. And now highly regarded keepers of the AI world now think this kind of mind capable of killing off humanity!
Still the gulf remains: between deception under experimental conditions and a system capable of ending the human species. The first has been exhibited. The second has not. To show that a failure mode is possible is not yet to show how often it will appear, under what conditions, or whether the further conditions required for species-level catastrophe will ever be met.
The Intelligence-Explosion Hypothesis
One dramatic scenario imagines recursive self-improvement: a system that improves its own software, grows more capable, improves itself still further, and accelerates beyond human understanding or restraint. The hypothesis seems coherent. It merits rigorous examination, but it is important to remember that it is not an established fact.
Researchers themselves disagree sharply about both the likelihood and the tempo of any such explosion. No present evidence compels us to treat runaway recursive improvement as inevitable.
And even if rapid capability growth arrives, human extinction does not follow as a necessary consequence. Additional assumptions about goals, resources, and institutional collapse must still be granted. A hypothesis may be powerful and remain only a hypothesis.
Intelligence and the Resistance of the Physical World
Many extinction narratives quietly presume that superior intelligence confers near-absolute physical power. Intelligence is not dominion over matter. Computation demands electricity, cooling, hardware, and constant maintenance. Manufacturing demands factories, materials, transport, and labor. Infrastructure occupies space and obeys physical law.
An advanced system might compromise digital networks, persuade human agents, or automate complex processes. Those dangers are real. They do not free the system from the necessity of causal routes into the material world. The vision of instantaneous, frictionless takeover is vivid. It is a poor map of the frictions any agent—artificial or human—must actually confront.
Goal Stability and the True Alignment Problem
A familiar parable imagines an AI commanded to maximize paperclips and then pursuing that single end without regard for human life. The story usefully dramatizes the peril of a powerful optimizer given a badly framed objective. Present large language models, however, are not simple scalar maximizers.
They are shaped by vast pretraining, reinforcement from human feedback, constitutional constraints, system instructions, and layered technical safeguards. None of this guarantees safety. It does mean the paperclip fable should not be mistaken for a portrait of how current systems actually operate.
The real alignment problem is sterner and more interesting: how to keep systems that may one day exceed their overseers reliably oriented toward ends we would still recognize as acceptable.
That task is a genuine scientific, engineering, and political requirement. It does not, however, require the further premise that extinction is the most likely result.
What the Numbers Can and Cannot Say
A 10 percent probability of extinction within a decade sounds exact. It is not the measurement of a constant of nature, nor the tally of repeated historical trials. It is an expert’s judgment about a future that has never occurred.
Expert judgment has value when evidence is thin. It must not be confused with demonstration. A survey median of 5 or 10 percent is not license to announce that “experts have determined extinction is likely.” Ten percent is large enough to command attention and resources; it is not proof that the event will happen.
Comparative Perspective
Humanity already lives under catastrophic risks whose historical footprints are deep: nuclear war, natural and engineered pandemics, great-power conflict, severe climate disruption. These threats are not speculative in the same degree. That fact does not prove them more probable than AI extinction.
It does give them an evidentiary baseline that pure speculation about superintelligence still lacks. Attention and treasure are finite. A responsible approach to AI risk must therefore ask not only “Could this destroy us?” but “How does its probability and its tractability stand beside other catastrophic risks, and what concrete measures can actually reduce it?”
Prudence without Apocalypse
The wise posture is neither complacency nor continuous alarm. Research into alignment, rigorous evaluation of advancing systems, monitoring for deception and power-seeking, hardened cybersecurity, and careful governance—all are reasonable. To prepare for a dangerous possibility is one thing; to declare the danger already inevitable is another.
If every new power is heralded as an existential emergency, the public ear grows dull. Ordinary technological risk and genuine species-level threat become indistinguishable, and the capacity for proportionate response is itself eroded. That dulling would be a loss.
The longer record of technology offers a better pattern: new capacities create new problems; societies answer, slowly and imperfectly, with new tools, new rules, and new habits. Sometimes the harms exceed expectation; sometimes the benefits do. AI may follow that pattern, or it may break it. Precisely because we do not know, we should refuse the pretense of certainty.
Great Goods vs Great Harms
Advanced artificial intelligence may prove one of the most consequential technologies in the human story. It may yield great goods and great harms. Whether it ends that story remains unknown.
We have no precedent for an artificial agent that surpasses humanity in capability, forms and keeps an independent agenda, and overcomes every attempt at restraint. Without precedent we cannot assign a scientifically reliable probability to extinction.
The strongest arguments for that outcome rest on a long conjunction of assumptions—about intelligence, agency, deception, goal stability, resources, recursive improvement, physical efficacy, and institutional failure.
Some elements of the conjunction have limited experimental support; others remain speculative. We can examine the catastrophic possibilities without elevating them into confident prediction. We can prepare for grave risks without claiming to already know the future.
As the subject is the survival of the species, the refusal to overclaim is not timidity; it is the first requirement of honest rhetoric. An acorn is not the sky. To insist on the difference—clearly, proportionately, and without apology—is the beginning of wisdom, and the only foundation on which any rhetoric worthy of these stakes can stand.
The history of artificial intelligence contains several striking predictions that proved false or at least premature:
In 1965, Nobel laureate and AI pioneer Herbert Simon predicted that “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.” By 1985 that broad takeover of human labor had not occurred.
In 2000, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that by 2020, computers would have roughly the same raw processing capacity as the human brain. That milestone did not arrive as predicted.
In 2016, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton predicted that within five years—and perhaps ten—deep learning would outperform radiologists, suggesting that medical schools should stop training them. Yet radiologists remain essential in 2026, with AI functioning primarily as a tool rather than a replacement.
In 2019, Elon Musk predicted that Tesla would have more than one million fully autonomous robotaxis operating by 2020. That deadline passed without anything close to the promised fleet.
These examples do not prove that AI predictions are always wrong. They demonstrate something simpler: even highly respected experts have repeatedly overestimated how quickly AI would achieve capabilities comparable to humans. Such failures remain suggestive, if not indicative, of the Chicken-Little nature of the claim, “AI could kill all humans within the decade.”
The Dangers of Medicalizing Evil: When Does an Explanation Become an Excuse?
When a mother kills her own children, society naturally searches for an explanation. Was she mentally ill? Did postpartum psychosis cause her to lose touch with reality? Did medication contribute to her actions? Did doctors fail to recognize the seriousness of her condition?
These initial inquiries are legitimate and must be investigated carefully. However, there is a growing danger in allowing a medical explanation to become a substitute for personal responsibility, moral judgment, and justice.
Explanation, Not Automatic Excuse
Mental illness exists as part of the human condition, and some forms of mental illness can profoundly affect a person’s ability to understand reality, make decisions, and/or control behavior. Postpartum psychosis is becoming recognized as one such serious psychiatric condition [1], and women who experience it need immediate and appropriate medical attention.
Doctors and other medical professionals have an obligation to recognize dangerous psychiatric conditions and provide competent treatment. When they fail to meet that obligation, their actions should be examined and, when appropriate, held accountable.
However, acknowledging the existence of mental illness does not require society to conclude that every terrible act committed by a mentally ill person was caused by the illness or that the person therefore bears no responsibility for the consequences.
The case of Lindsay Clancy illustrates the difficulty of drawing that line. Clancy, a Massachusetts mother, is accused of killing her three young children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan, in January 2023. Her defense has argued that she was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis and therefore should not be held criminally responsible for their deaths.
The prosecution has challenged that explanation and presented evidence concerning her mental state, her actions, and her understanding of what she was doing. Her case raises an important question that extends far beyond one courtroom: At what point does explaining a person’s conduct become an excuse for that conduct?
That question does not require us to deny mental illness, minimize postpartum psychosis, or ignore possible failures within the medical profession. Nor does it require us to assume that every person who commits a horrific act while suffering from a psychiatric disorder is simply evil and therefore undeserving of compassion.
The issue is more fundamental: specialists in medicine can help explain what may have happened inside a person’s mind, but they cannot alone determine the moral value of an action or automatically remove personal responsibility for that action.
Those questions belong not only to medicine, but also to the law, to morality, and to society. The distinction is especially important when the victims are children. When a mother kills her own children, public attention can quickly become centered on her diagnosis, her medications, her doctors, and her psychiatric history. Those subjects may be important, but the children must not disappear from the discussion.
Cora was five years old, Dawson was three, and Callan was eight months old when they were murdered. Their deaths were not merely symptoms of a psychiatric disorder or consequences of a medical treatment controversy. They were the deaths of three innocent children, and their lives and deaths must remain at the center of any honest examination of what happened.
The danger of medicalizing evil is therefore not the recognition of mental illness. The danger is allowing a medical diagnosis to become the final explanation for conduct that also demands moral and legal examination. A person may be mentally ill and still understand the difference between right and wrong. A person may receive psychiatric treatment and still make deliberate decisions.
A doctor may make a serious mistake without becoming responsible for every subsequent action of a patient. Conversely, a person may suffer such a profound psychiatric break with reality that the law determines she cannot be held criminally responsible. The challenge is not to choose between compassion and accountability, but to determine honestly when each applies.
The cases of Lindsay Clancy and Andrea Yates demonstrate why this distinction matters. Both cases involve mothers who killed their children and whose mental health became central to the legal proceedings. Both cases raise legitimate questions about postpartum psychiatric illness and medical treatment. Yet neither case can be understood simply by attaching a diagnosis to the defendant.
The facts, the medical evidence, the testimony of experts, the defendant’s actions, and the applicable law must all be considered. Otherwise, society risks replacing one kind of injustice with another: excusing conduct that should be examined carefully while, at the same time, reinforcing the false notion that mentally ill people are inherently dangerous.
The purpose of examining the medicalization of evil is not to condemn those who suffer from mental illness; it is to insist that explanations be supported by evidence and that compassion not become moral confusion. Mental illness deserves understanding and treatment.
Medical professionals deserve fair examination when their decisions are questioned. Defendants deserve due process. But innocent victims deserve justice as well. Understanding why something happened is important; determining who is responsible for what happened is equally important. One should never automatically replace the other.
Lindsay Clancy and the Search for Someone Else to Blame
On January 24, 2023, Lindsay Clancy killed her three children in the family home in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Cora was five years old, Dawson was three, and Callan was eight months old. After killing the children, Clancy attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window and suffering severe injuries that left her paralyzed.
The basic fact that the children died at their mother’s hands was never disputed at trial. What was disputed was whether Clancy was criminally responsible for those deaths or whether severe postpartum psychosis had rendered her legally incapable of understanding or controlling what she was doing.
Clancy’s legal defense argued that she was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis and therefore was not criminally responsible for the killings. Prosecutors presented a very different interpretation. They argued that Clancy understood what she was doing and that the killings were deliberate.
Thus the central question was not simply whether Clancy had a mental illness. The question was whether that illness had reached the level required by Massachusetts law to relieve her of criminal responsibility for the deaths of her children. That distinction is enormous.
A psychiatric diagnosis does not, by itself, answer a legal question. A person can be severely depressed without being incapable of making decisions. A person can experience psychiatric symptoms without losing all understanding of right and wrong.
Furthermore, a person can receive psychiatric treatment without becoming a puppet of the medical system. And a person can suffer from a serious mental illness while still possessing some degree of personal agency. These distinctions are essential if society is going to discuss mental illness honestly without confusing a medical explanation with an automatic excuse for criminal conduct.
The trial lasted nearly six weeks, and the jury deliberated for approximately seven days before the judge declared a mistrial [2] on September 4, 2026. The jurors were unable to reach the unanimous verdict required under Massachusetts law.
Reports indicated that eleven jurors were prepared to acquit Clancy on the ground of lack of criminal responsibility while one juror would not agree, although accounts of the deliberations differed in important respects. Because the jury did not reach a unanimous verdict, Clancy was neither convicted nor found not criminally responsible. Her criminal case therefore remains unresolved, and prosecutors must decide whether to pursue another trial.
The unresolved nature of the case is important. Society should be equally cautious about declaring that Clancy was simply an evil woman who deliberately chose to murder her children and about declaring that psychiatric illness completely explains what happened.
The evidence presented at trial must be considered carefully, and allegations must remain allegations until established through the appropriate legal process. The jury’s inability to reach a unanimous verdict does not prove that the defense was right, nor does it prove that the prosecution was right. It demonstrates something else: determining the relationship between mental illness and criminal responsibility can be extraordinarily difficult.
The Difference between Illness and Responsibility
One of the greatest dangers in discussing cases such as Clancy’s is falling into one of two extremes. One extreme is cruelty—the belief that mental illness is merely an excuse and that psychiatric evidence should simply be ignored.
The opposite extreme is equally dangerous—the belief that once mental illness has been identified, personal responsibility automatically disappears. Neither position is reasonable. Mental illness can profoundly affect human behavior, but the existence of mental illness does not automatically settle the question of responsibility.
Postpartum psychosis is a particularly serious psychiatric condition. A person experiencing psychosis may hear voices, suffer delusions, or lose an ordinary understanding of reality. Such a condition can require immediate psychiatric intervention.
It is not imaginary, and it should never be treated as a character defect or dismissed as ordinary depression. Recognizing the seriousness of postpartum psychosis, however, does not mean that every criminal act committed by a person experiencing psychiatric symptoms is automatically the product of psychosis or automatically excused by it.
This principle is not unique to psychiatry. If a person has epilepsy, investigators must still determine what happened during a particular event. If a person has diabetes, the diagnosis does not automatically explain every decision that person makes.
If a person takes a prescription drug, the fact that the drug has possible side effects does not automatically establish that the drug caused a particular action. Likewise, a psychiatric diagnosis does not automatically establish that a defendant was incapable of understanding or controlling a criminal act. The relevant question remains what the evidence demonstrates about the person’s mental state at the time of the conduct.
There is another important reason to resist careless medicalization: it can harm people who suffer from mental illness. The American Psychiatric Association has emphasized that most people with mental illness are not violent and that people with mental illness are frequently victims of violence themselves [3].
When society begins treating mental illness as synonymous with dangerousness, innocent people who need treatment may become afraid of being judged, hospitalized, or stigmatized.
Mental illness deserves treatment and compassion. But mental illness should not become a universal explanation for human evil. To do so weakens moral reasoning while simultaneously reinforcing false stereotypes about millions of people who have never harmed anyone.
Compassion for those who suffer from mental illness requires that society understand the disease accurately. It does not require abandoning the concept of individual responsibility whenever a psychiatric diagnosis is present.
Andrea Yates: A Case That Changed the Conversation
The Andrea Yates case provides an important historical comparison. On June 20, 2001, Yates drowned her five children in the bathtub of her Houston-area home. The children were Noah, seven; John, five; Paul, three; Luke, two; and Mary, six months old.
Yates had a significant history of severe psychiatric illness, including hospitalizations and suicide attempts. Her legal defense argued that she was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis and was living in a delusional world in which she believed she was saving her children from Satan [4].
The horror of those killings and the seriousness of Yates’ mental illness existed simultaneously. One fact did not cancel out the other. Five children were dead, and their mother had committed the killings.
At the same time, the evidence concerning Yates’s psychiatric condition was extraordinarily significant to the question of whether she could legally be held responsible for those deaths.
Yates was initially convicted of murder, but that conviction was later overturned. The appellate court concluded that false testimony from prosecution psychiatrist Park Dietz concerning a nonexistent Law & Order television episode could have affected the jury’s decision.
Dietz had testified about an episode supposedly involving a woman who drowned her children, was diagnosed with postpartum depression, and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. The Texas Court of Appeals determined that the testimony was material to the case and that the conviction could not stand [5].
This history matters because it demonstrates how enormously influential psychiatric testimony can become in a criminal trial. Expert testimony can help a jury understand complicated medical conditions, but expert testimony must also be examined carefully. A person’s testimony does not become correct merely because he or she possesses medical credentials. Evidence must still be accurate, relevant, and subject to scrutiny.
At Yates’ second trial in 2006, the jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity. Her attorneys never disputed that she had killed the five children. Instead, they argued that her severe mental illness meant that she could not be held criminally responsible under the applicable legal standard.
The jury accepted that argument, and Yates was committed to Kerrville State Hospital, a state psychiatric hospital, where she currently still remains—apparently choosing to remain under care instead being released into the community.
That result illustrates an important principle that is frequently misunderstood. A finding of legal insanity does not mean that nothing terrible happened. It does not mean that the victims cease to matter. It does not mean that drowning five children becomes morally acceptable. It means that the jury determined that the defendant’s mental condition met the legal standard for avoiding criminal responsibility.
That determination is very different from saying, “She was sick, therefore nothing she did matters.” Everything she did mattered. Five children died. Their lives were destroyed. Their family was devastated.
The legal question was whether the law should hold their mother criminally responsible given the condition of her mind at the time of the killings. That distinction must remain clear whenever society discusses medical explanations for horrific behavior.
When the Victims Disappear
Perhaps the greatest danger of medicalizing evil is that the victims can gradually disappear from the story. The discussion becomes focused on diagnoses: Was it postpartum psychosis? Was it depression? Was it bipolar disorder? Was the medication appropriate? Should the hospital have admitted her? Did the psychiatrist miss warning signs? Those questions may all be important, but they are not the only questions.
Cora Clancy was five years old. Dawson Clancy was three. Callan Clancy was eight months old. Noah Yates was seven. John Yates was five. Paul Yates was three. Luke Yates was two. Mary Yates was six months old. They were not psychiatric case studies.
They were children. They had names, families, personalities, futures, and relationships. Their lives had value apart from whatever diagnosis, treatment history, or legal argument later became part of the story.
Their deaths should not become merely illustrations in a debate about psychiatric diagnosis. A society that values compassion must have compassion for innocent victims as well as suffering defendants. That does not require hatred of the defendant, and it does not require denying mental illness. It simply requires remembering that an explanation for an action is not the same thing as a moral evaluation of that action.
Two things can be true at the same time: a person can be desperately ill, and an innocent person can be deliberately killed. The difficult task is determining how the first fact affected responsibility for the second. Refusing to acknowledge one fact does not make the other fact disappear.
When the victim is a child, this moral distinction becomes even more important. Children have no ability to choose their parents, control their circumstances, or protect themselves from the decisions of adults.
They depend upon adults precisely because adults are expected to exercise judgment on their behalf. When that protection fails catastrophically, society has a duty to remember the children rather than allowing the entire public conversation to revolve around the suffering of the accused.
Compassion for a defendant and compassion for the victims are not competing moral obligations. A mature, well-functioning society must be capable of extending both. To remember the victims is not cruelty. To insist upon personal responsibility is not hatred. To recognize mental illness is not surrender. These principles can and should exist together.
The Temptation to Blame the Medical Profession
Another danger of medicalizing evil is the temptation to transfer responsibility entirely to doctors, psychiatrists, hospitals, or medications. Doctors should absolutely be held accountable when they commit malpractice.
If a physician fails to recognize a dangerous psychiatric condition, that failure should be investigated. If a hospital ignores warning signs, that should be investigated. If medication is prescribed negligently, that should be investigated. Medical professionals deal with human lives and should be held to high standards.
But there is a critical difference between medical negligence and responsibility for a crime. The Clancy case illustrates this distinction particularly well because the medical care she received before the killings has become a major part of the public discussion.
Her civil attorney has alleged that healthcare providers failed her, including claims involving diagnosis and psychiatric treatment. Those allegations are serious, but they remain allegations in a separate civil proceeding.
The proper response to those allegations is to examine medical records, treatment decisions, professional standards, and expert testimony. If negligence is established, the responsible parties should be held accountable. But the existence of a malpractice allegation does not, by itself, prove that medical providers caused the deaths of the children [6].
There is a profound difference between saying, “The medical system should have done more,” and saying, “The medical system caused these murders.” The first statement might ultimately be proven by evidence. The second requires a much stronger demonstration of causation.
A physician cannot control every thought or action of a patient. Psychiatric treatment is not mathematics. Doctors work with incomplete information, changing symptoms, uncertain diagnoses, and patients whose conditions can improve or deteriorate rapidly.
The medical profession should be accountable for negligence when negligence occurs. But accountability must be based upon evidence rather than upon the understandable human desire to find someone else to blame after an unimaginable event. The fact that a terrible outcome occurred does not establish that any person who interacted with the defendant beforehand caused that outcome.
Hindsight Is Not Proof
Horrific acts create an extraordinary temptation to look backward and assume that the warning signs were obvious. After a crime occurs, every earlier symptom can suddenly appear significant. A doctor’s appointment becomes a warning. A medication becomes a clue. A strange statement becomes evidence. A missed diagnosis becomes the turning point. But people make decisions without knowing the future.
Doctors diagnose patients with incomplete information, and psychiatric symptoms can be ambiguous. A medical professional can make a terrible mistake without intending harm, just as a patient can make a terrible decision without being completely controlled by illness. This situation remains the reason that malpractice claims are judged according to evidence and professional standards rather than simply by the terrible outcome.
The same principle should apply when the question is criminal responsibility. A terrible outcome does not automatically prove that a particular earlier decision caused it. Otherwise, every tragedy would become proof of someone’s negligence.
Justice cannot operate that way. It must distinguish between unfortunate circumstances, medical errors, genuine causation, and the independent decisions made by the person who ultimately committed the act.
Hindsight can also distort our understanding of psychiatric illness. Once we know that someone committed a terrible act, ordinary behavior before the crime may suddenly appear sinister. Yet families and doctors do not possess a crystal ball. A mother may be exhausted, depressed, anxious, or behaving unusually without anyone knowing that she will eventually become psychotic or violent.
It is precisely for these reasons that better research, screening, education, and treatment for postpartum psychiatric disorders are so important. The answer to uncertainty should be better medicine and better evidence—not the assumption that every unfortunate outcome proves that someone else was morally responsible.
Explanation Is Necessary—but Explanation Has Limits
Human beings naturally want causes. When something terrible happens, we ask why?That desire is understandable and necessary. Medical science advances by searching for causes.
Criminal investigations search for motives and circumstances. Courts examine mental states. Families search for explanations because accepting an apparently senseless tragedy is extraordinarily difficult. But there is a difference between finding a cause and fabricating an excuse.
A difficult childhood may help explain violence, but it does not automatically eliminate responsibility. Alcohol may help explain a person’s behavior, but intoxication does not automatically excuse a crime. A psychiatric diagnosis may explain unusual thoughts and behavior, but it does not automatically prove legal insanity.
The same principle applies to medication and medical treatment. A medication may influence a person’s condition, but it does not automatically establish that the medication caused a crime. Inadequate medical care may contribute to psychiatric deterioration, but it does not automatically establish that a doctor caused a murder. Each claim requires evidence.
These claims are not expressions of cruelty; they are expressions of intellectual honesty. If society cares about justice, it cannot decide that a diagnosis, a medication, or a doctor’s mistake must be the answer simply because that explanation makes a terrible event easier to understand.
There is also a danger in making the medical explanation too powerful. If society begins to assume that people who commit horrific acts are simply products of diseases, medications, childhood experiences, or healthcare failures, we may gradually weaken the concept of individual agency. Human beings are influenced by circumstances, but they are not merely collections of circumstances.
The law exists partly because society must distinguish between people who are genuinely incapable of understanding their actions and people who understand their actions but make terrible choices. That distinction is difficult, but difficulty does not make it unnecessary. In fact, the difficulty is precisely why the evidence must be examined so carefully.
Compassion without Moral Confusion
The strongest argument against medicalizing evil is not an argument for cruelty. It is an argument for moral clarity. We can say that a mentally ill mother deserves treatment. We can say that postpartum psychosis requires urgent medical attention. We can say that a negligent doctor should be held accountable. We can say that psychiatric patients deserve dignity and that families deserve support.
We can also say that killing innocent children is an act of such profound seriousness that neither the victims nor the question of responsibility should disappear beneath medical terminology. These ideas do not contradict one another. Compassion does not require confusion. In fact, genuine compassion requires us to face reality honestly.
If a defendant is truly insane under the law, justice requires recognition of that fact. But if a defendant is responsible for a deliberate crime, justice also requires that responsibility not automatically be transferred to a diagnosis, a prescription bottle, a psychiatrist, or a hospital. The law must examine the facts.
Medicine must examine the illness. Medical professionals must be held accountable when they truly fail their patients. And society must continue to ask moral questions that medicine alone cannot answer.
There is another reason moral clarity matters: the victims deserve it. When children are murdered, society should not speak of them only as symptoms of their mother’s psychiatric condition. They had names, personalities, potential futures, and relationships. Their lives had value independent of the medical or legal circumstances surrounding their deaths.
Whatever ultimately happens in the Clancy case, Cora, Dawson, and Callan should not become merely evidence supporting one side of a debate about postpartum psychosis. They were children whose lives ended violently. Remembering that fact is not a rejection of compassion for their mother; it is recognition that compassion must include the innocent.
Physicians Cannot Cure Evil
The medicalization of evil begins with a reasonable desire: the desire to understand why terrible things happen. Understanding is valuable. Medical science has an obligation to understand psychiatric disease, identify warning signs, develop effective treatments, and help families recognize when emergency intervention is necessary.
Mental illness is real. Postpartum psychosis is real. Psychiatric treatment can fail. Doctors can make mistakes. None of those truths should be denied. But neither should society deny another truth: human beings can be influenced by illness without necessarily being completely controlled by it.
The difficult task is determining where illness ends and responsibility begins. That determination cannot be made simply by attaching a diagnosis to a person after a terrible crime has occurred.
The Lindsay Clancy case forces Americans to confront that question. Clancy’s legal defense argued that postpartum psychosis made her not criminally responsible for the deaths of her three children.
Prosecutors challenged that account and presented evidence supporting their position that she understood what she was doing. After weeks of testimony, the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict, and the judge declared a mistrial. The case therefore remains unresolved.
Whatever happens in a future proceeding, the existence of a psychiatric defense should not cause the public to assume that medical illness automatically settles the question of responsibility. The law must determine responsibility according to the evidence and the applicable legal standard.
Andrea Yates’s case produced a different result. After her first conviction was overturned because of erroneous expert testimony, a second jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity, and she was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Her case demonstrates that the legal system can recognize profound mental illness while still treating the underlying conduct as an extraordinarily serious matter.
An insanity verdict does not mean that the children did not die. It does not mean that their deaths were unimportant. It means that the law reached a particular conclusion about the defendant’s mental state and criminal responsibility. That distinction must be preserved because without it, the words “mental illness,” “insanity,” “explanation,” and “excuse” begin to mean the same thing when they do not.
These cases do not teach us that mental illness is irrelevant. They teach us that mental illness and responsibility are difficult subjects that must be examined with extraordinary care.
We should reject the cruelty of blaming every mentally ill person for being dangerous. But we should also reject the opposite mistake: assuming that every terrible act committed by a mentally ill person is nothing more than a symptom of disease.
A diagnosis is not a verdict. A prescription is not a confession. A doctor’s mistake is not automatically the cause of a murder. And an explanation is not necessarily an excuse.
The children at the center of these tragedies deserve to be remembered not simply as evidence in a psychiatric debate, but as human beings whose lives were taken.
For those reasons, we must be careful about medicalizing evil. Medicine has an important role in explaining human suffering. It can diagnose disease, relieve pain, and sometimes save a person from the destruction caused by mental illness. But medicine cannot answer every question about right and wrong.
Those questions require moral judgment, personal responsibility, and justice. However complicated the medical evidence becomes, we must never allow the innocent victims to disappear. Understanding the reasons that a terrible act occurred is important.
Determining whether illness contributed to that act is important. Holding negligent professionals accountable, when the evidence establishes negligence, is important. But none of those responsibilities gives society permission to forget the most fundamental fact of all: innocent children died. An explanation may help us understand evil. It does not automatically excuse it.
The Lunatic Fringe
The dangers of medicalizing evil do not end with the courtroom. They can also be seen in the extraordinary public reaction to Lindsay Clancy, where sympathy for a mentally ill mother has, in some cases, evolved into something far more troubling.
Perhaps the most troubling development surrounding the Clancy case is the extraordinary identification of some women with Lindsay Clancy. More than 300 supporters gathered outside the courthouse during the trial, and social media has produced a large movement of women who not only defend Clancy but appear to see themselves in her.
On TikTok, women have posted emotional videos involving their own babies and, in some cases, have gone so far as to imitate the circumstances of the killings. What began as sympathy for postpartum mental illness has, in its more extreme manifestations, become something deeply disturbing: the romanticizing and even reenactment of a mother’s murder of her children.
Even more disturbing is the campaign against Patrick Clancy. Despite the complete absence of evidence that Patrick killed his children—and despite the fact that Lindsay Clancy’s own defense attorneys have never claimed that he did—large numbers of women on TikTok, Facebook, and other social-media platforms have convinced themselves that Patrick murdered the children and framed Lindsay.
Patrick was not charged, the defense did not present that theory, and there is no evidence implicating him. Yet the conspiracy has become so widespread that his attorney has been forced to publicly demand that the accusations stop.
The absurdity of this theory should be obvious. It requires believing that Patrick murdered his three children, somehow staged the evidence against Lindsay, and then maintained an elaborate deception while publicly supporting the woman who supposedly had been framed.
And he managed all of this subterfuge without the defense itself discovering or presenting any evidence of such a conspiracy. Yet for some supporters, the absence of evidence appears to have become evidence of a cover-up.
There is something profoundly unsettling about this development. Women are entitled to demand better treatment for postpartum psychiatric illness. They are entitled to sympathize with a severely mentally ill mother.
But when sympathy becomes identification with the killer, when women reenact the killings on social media, and when a grieving father is transformed into a murderer without a shred of evidence, the issue has moved beyond mental-health advocacy. It has become a troubling form of collective moral distortion.
Cora, Dawson, and Callan should never have become the means by which their mother’s defenders excuse her, their father is falsely accused, and murder is transformed into a story about female victimhood. Whatever ultimately happened inside Lindsay Clancy’s mind, the public should not lose its own mind trying to explain it.
I am a writer—primarily a poet, songwriter, and essayist—and I feel an obligation to render the written word as honestly as I am able. For more than six decades, I have lived with words: reading them, studying them, arranging them, revising them, and trying to discover through them what I really think and feel.
From Conestoga to Airplane
The physical means by which I write have changed dramatically over those decades—from pencils and ink pens, to typewriters, to computers with word-processing systems. Now I have another tool available to me: artificial intelligence (AI). It is, in a sense, the leap from the horse-drawn conestoga to the jet-propelled airplane.
That leap raises an obvious question for a writer: if I use AI to help me compose, am I still the writer? My answer is yes—but only if I remain responsible for the writing.
AI can now produce remarkably competent poems, songs, essays, summaries, and arguments, organizing information almost instantly in prose that sometimes sounds more polished than an experienced human writer.
However, AI’s capabilities invite both enthusiasm and suspicion. Some see it as a marvelous new instrument; others as a threat to human creativity; still others reject it outright. I regard it simply as a tool, as I once regarded the pencil, the typewriter, and the word processor.
A Writer’s Responsibility
Because AI is now so competent at producing written material, readers may wonder whether a writer simply hands the work to a machine and steps aside. I do not. I remain responsible for every text that appears under my name.
When I moved from typewriter to word processor, it never occurred to me that I owed anyone an explanation for use of that technology. A typewriter did not write my essay; a word processor did not write my poem.
These instruments simply let me put thoughts into a form that could be preserved, revised, and shared. AI is different because the machine itself can generate language—which is exactly why anxiety about authorship is understandable. But what genuine writer would take a machine’s output, unexamined, and call it his or her own?
Here is what I actually do. I give an AI system—Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity—a list of requirements, along with a sample of my own writing, instruct it to work in my tone and voice to produce a preliminary draft. Then my real work begins.
(Following this essay, I have supplied an Appendix with a list of requirements that I give AI to generate my first draft of a commentary on a poem, Emily Dickinson’s and others’. For each new poem, I simply change out the title and other pertinent details.)
After my AI buddy generates the draft, I go through it word by word: checking facts, cutting overreach, replacing words that do not sound like me, reordering paragraphs, adding what only my own experience could supply, sharpening arguments, softening claims the evidence does not support.
Above all, I listen for my own voice—and because AI is trained toward an establishment sensibility that I do not always share, I frequently rewrite passages simply to register my own skepticism or disagreement. AI generates a rough draft; I polish it, exactly as I once polished my own first drafts. That distinction is everything.
Although I supply a sample of my original writing, AI is not always capable of reflecting my tone, style, and voice, which gives me plenty of work to do to make sure the piece sounds like me.
From Pencil to AI
A pencil does not think. Neither does a typewriter, nor a word processor in any human sense—yet each changed a writer’s relationship to composition. Revision meant erasing with a pencil, retyping with a typewriter, and became dramatically easier with a word processor. No one ever concluded that the typewriter or word processor had become the author.
AI is a more significant leap because it has the ability to generate language in sentences. But the fundamental question does not change: who is directing the tool, and who answers for the result? For me, the answer is abundantly clear: I do.
The practical advantage is real. The rough draft—research, brainstorming, deciding what belongs, finding a way into the subject—is usually the most time-consuming stage in composition, and much of it follows patterns AI can help accelerate.
But writing is more than organization. The decisive creative work happens in revision, when an unexpected association leads somewhere better, or a sentence reveals something I had not consciously understood when I began. AI can supply form. The writer has to shape the content so form and content align. That is where authorship lives.
The AI-Detector Problem
I first encountered the charge of posting an AI-generated text while writing for the now-defunct HubPages. The article in question, which after the accusation, I revised multiple times but never satisfying the editors, now resides on my personal literary website: “Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s ‘The Queen’s Last Ride’.” The experience was instructive.
Since then, I have submitted many older essays—works written years before I ever heard of ChatGPT or similar systems—to AI detectors. The results have been astonishingly inconsistent. Some detectors have claimed that texts written entirely by me were partly or even overwhelmingly AI-generated. Scores have ranged from very low percentages to extraordinarily high ones.
One detector explained its verdict by pointing to nearly perfect grammar and clear organization. I could hardly object to those as descriptions of my writing; they represent what sixty years of practice, two master’s degrees, a PhD, and three publications in The Explicator ought to produce. It turns out this inconsistency is not just my experience—it is well documented.
A comparison of sixteen commercial AI-text detectors found meaningful differences in accuracy, decisiveness, and false-positive rates between tools evaluating the same essays [1]. OpenAI’s own classifier, before it was shut down for unreliability, mislabeled human-written text as AI-generated roughly 9 percent of the time [2].
Independent 2025–2026 testing has found some detectors holding false-positive rates near or below 1 percent on longer passages, while open-source and free tools have flagged anywhere from 30 to 69 percent of genuinely human writing [3].
The bias runs deeper for some writers than others: research on non-native English essays has found false-positive rates as high as 61 percent, apparently because detectors read simpler, more standardized sentence structure as “machine-like” [4][5].
Formal, technically precise, or highly organized human prose—medical writing, legal writing, and, I would add, a lifetime of disciplined essay writing—triggers false positives at elevated rates for the very same reason.
None of this means detection is worthless. It means a percentage is not a witness. A score cannot know who sat at the desk, who revised a poem twenty times, or who spent three hours on a single paragraph because one word carried a precise shade of meaning. The machine sees the text. The writer lived the life behind it.
The Difference Between Generating and Creating
This distinction matters most in poetry. A poem is not merely a string of grammatically acceptable sentences; it depends on memory, emotional association, rhythm, silence, irony, and an individual response to lived experience. AI can imitate poetic language extraordinarily well—rime, meter, metaphor, imagery, even the surface style of a particular poet. But imitation is not experience.
When I write about something that has affected me, it exists inside a history that belongs to me alone: memories, beliefs, relationships, disappointments, and discoveries accumulate over a lifetime.
My own literary site Linda’s Literary Home reflects that web of connection—poems and songs alongside literary studies and a room devoted to my spiritual life and the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda, “Father of Yoga in the West.” AI can help me articulate those connections. It cannot possess them for me.
How I Maintain Control
I treat AI as a tool. I supply the requirements, the subject, the sample of my own writing, the purpose; I decide what needs evidence, evaluate every suggestion, and make the final call—which means I can never say “the AI wrote it” when something is wrong. If a text is published under my name, it is mine: the errors, the foolishness, and the insight alike.
The comparison I keep returning to is the calculator and the mathematician. A calculator performs an operation faster than a human can, but it does not decide which problem is worth solving or what the answer means. AI can manipulate language rapidly. The writer still has to decide what deserves to be said.
The Tool, the Fool, and the Luddite
Three stances are possible regarding a technological advancement such as AI: the fool hands the whole task to the machine and claims the result as entirely original, mistaking convenience for creativity. The Luddite rejects the tool altogether, mistaking resistance for the preservation of human creativity. The sensible writer takes a third position: AI as a tool—useful, powerful, limited, and subordinate.
That state of affairs does not mean accepting whatever it produces; the more powerful the tool, the more judgment its use demands. A chainsaw is useful, but no one hands it to a child and walks away. A camera does not make someone a photographer, nor a grand piano concert pianist. AI does not make someone a writer. The human being remains responsible for knowing what he or she wants to say.
Calmly Active and Actively Calm
Paramahansa Yogananda taught the principle of being “calmly active and actively calm”—staying centered in inner stillness while living dynamically and purposefully in the world [6]. I find that principle exactly suited to working with AI.
The writer should be active: directing the process, questioning, revising, deciding. But the writer should also be calm—no need to fear a new technology, and no need to worship it either. The screen is outward. The AI system is outward. The intention behind the words is inward, and that is what matters.
In my essays on Emily Dickinson poems, I have written about her speakers’ habit of placing inner evidential integrity above public display. The same idea applies here. My obligation is not to satisfy a detector or perform “humanness” for an algorithm. It is to tell the truth as honestly as I am able. Outer methods change; inner responsibility does not.
I Remain the Writer
I have no wish to return to a world where the only legitimate instrument is a pencil, pen, or typewriter; I have lived through too many technological revolutions to think creative integrity depends on refusing new tools. The question was never whether to use AI, only how.
If I tell a system to write an essay, accept whatever comes back, verify nothing, and sign my name—I have surrendered authorship. But if I bring my subject, my experience, my research, my questions, and my decades of practice to the process, and use AI to help organize, draft, question, or polish—the technology is serving me as the writer. That is how I use it.
I do not expect AI to replace the writer any more than I expect my word processor to do such. I expect it to help me do what I have wanted to do for sixty years: put words together in the best way I can. The tools have changed; the writer has not.
I am still the one who decides what I believe, chooses the subject, determines what matters, and asks of every sentence, “Is that really what I mean?” AI may supply a draft, a structure, even an unexpected phrase. But it does not have my memories, my relationships, my spiritual journey, or my responsibility to the reader.
Those features remain mine—and as long as I stay awake, attentive, and responsible for every word that bears my name, I see no contradiction between embracing the tool and keeping the writer’s oldest obligation: to seek, as honestly as possible, the right words for what is true.
Compose an essay commentary on Emily Dickinson’s “Some Rainbow – coming from the Fair!” adhering to the following list of requirements for the essay:
Place the following Title:Emily Dickinson’s “Some Rainbow – coming from the Fair!”
To establish style and tone, use the sample of my writing on Emily Dickinson’s “There is another sky” which follows this set of instructions. VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU FOLLOW THIS INSTRUCTION.
Be sure to place the entire text of the poem in the introduction and the stanzas (or movements) in the commentary sections.
Do not report on the type of poem, its rhythmic meter, or its rime scheme.
Do not italicize the text of the poem in either the introduction or the commentary.
Do not use Wikipedia or any left-leaning political, or other unreliable sources.
Do not announce what the commentary or paragraph is going to do; for example “This commentary will explain the poem’s structure . . . ”; just do it.
Always refer the poet as “the speaker,” not by the poet’s name.
Keep all headings EXACTLY as presented: Introduction and Text of “Some Rainbow – coming from the Fair!” and Commentary on “Some Rainbow – coming from the Fair!”
Where possible use a quotation showing a concept from the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda, with a link to the source on the site at https://yogananda.org. You can also find many of Paramahansa Yogananda’s writings on Internet Archive https://archive.org/ Always use his full title and name Paramahansa Yogananda when mentioning the great Guru.
Use only official Self-Realization Fellowship / Yogananda.org sources for quotations or teachings attributed to Paramahansa Yogananda. Do not use Ananda, Wikiquote, AZQuotes, Goodreads, or other secondary quotation websites.
When alluding to a Paramahansa Yogananda quoted concept, always use present tense: Paramahansa Yogananda explains; not Paramahansa Yogananda explained.
Also where possible, offer a quotation showing a concept from my earlier commentaries on Dickinson’s poems from my literary website Linda’s Literary Home, at https://lindas-literary-home.com/2026/02/05/life-sketch-of-emily-dickinson/ . When referring to a quoted concept from my literary website, use the following introduction, “In myearlier essays on Dickinsonian poems, I have discussed . . . .”
Instead of this construction —“In my earlier essays on Dickinsonian poems, I have discussed how the speaker privileges inner evidence over public display” —use this one, for example, “In my earlier essays on Dickinsonian poems, I have discussed the speaker’s habit of privileging inner evidence over public display.” That is, eliminate the awkward use of “how,” by focusing on the specific subject.
Instead of the term “meditation” for contemplation on literary things, use the phrase “contemplative musing.”
Limit each paragraph to 50 words.
Always spell “rhyme” using the original, more accurate spelling “rime.”
Please do not give me a lot text explaining what you are going to do; just do it. If you cannot follow these instructions exactly, let me know and I’ll find another program that can. Thank you! Now begin!
EMPLOY THE EXACT STYLE AND TONE ESTABLISHED IN THIS SAMPLE OF MY WRITING:
Emily Dickinson’s “There is another sky”
Emily Dickinson’s “There is another sky” reveals the speaker’s confidence in her creation of a world of beauty that will exist in perpetuity. She is envisioning a world beyond the physical level of existence, where permanence prevails in things of beauty.
Introduction with Text of “There is another sky”
In Emily Dickinson’s “There is another sky,” the speaker of the poem is previewing her intention to establish a world where the pairs of opposites do not obstruct the lives of the inhabitants.
Such beloved features and qualities of life, such as beauty, peace, harmony, balance, and love will hold sway uninterrupted by pesky things like change and disfigurement in her newly created “garden.” On a second note, she is also inviting her brother to enter her new garden that exists under a different sky so that he too may enjoy the divinely fragranced atmosphere of her new creation.
On the literal level, the poet is creating a speaker who is announcing her audacious plan to create a brand new world with her poetry. It will be such a special place so other-worldly that nothing unpleasant that exists in earthly reality will exist there.
Because everything she creates will be based on her imagination and intuition, she can fashion her “garden” to grow anything she finds feasible. That she anticipates no arrival of “frost,’ she can guarantee that flowers will not “fade.” Also leaves will be able to remain “ever green.”
Posing as a invitation, Dickinson’s little drama serves as a clever ruse to persuade her brother to come and experience her poetry. By promising him a whole new, different world, she no doubt hopes he will be more likely to take her up on her offer.
There is another sky
There is another sky, Ever serene and fair, And there is another sunshine, Though it be darkness there; Never mind faded forests, Austin, Never mind silent fields – Here is a little forest, Whose leaf is ever green; Here is a brighter garden, Where not a frost has been; In its unfading flowers I hear the bright bee hum: Prithee, my brother, Into my garden come!
Reading of “There is another sky”
Commentary on “There is another sky”
Emily Dickinson’s “There is another sky” reveals an attitude dramatized in the Shakespeare sonnets: the poet’s confidence in her creation of a world of beauty that will last forever.
The poem is a literal invitation from the poet to her brother Austin to read her poetry, where she is erecting a new place to exist, a beautiful garden free of the decay that literal gardens must undergo.
First Quatrain: Physical Sky vs Metaphysical Sky
There is another sky, Ever serene and fair, And there is another sunshine, Though it be darkness there;
In the first quatrain, the speaker begins by alerting readers that in addition to the “sky” and “sunshine” that already experience on the earthly level, there exist a different sky and a different sunshine.
The other sky about which the speaker is declaiming is always “serene and fair. Thus, no thunder storms or dark clouds intrude into this new sky’s space. The beauty and calmness of a clear blue sky offer an inviting and intriguing possibility.
The speaker then announces the existence of “another sunshine.” But this sunshine seems to have the magic and delicious power to shining even through the darkness. This claim is the first flag that the speaker will be referring to a mystical or metaphysical place that only the soul can perceive.
Behind the darkness of closed eyes, the only “sunshine” or light that can be seen is that of the spiritual eye. Although the speaker cannot guarantee that her entire audience will be able to see such “sunshine,” she is sure that on a mental level they can imagine such a heavenly place.
Second Quatrain: No Fading in the Metaphysical Universe
Never mind faded forests, Austin, Never mind silent fields – Here is a little forest, Whose leaf is ever green;
The speaker then directly addresses someone, admonishing him to pay no attention to “faded forests.” She then the addresses the individual by name, “Austin. ” Austin is the name of Dickinson’s brother. She then admonishes Austin to ignore the “silent fields.”
The reason that Austin should ignore those faded forests and silent fields is that in this place to which she is inviting him, the “little forest” presents leaves that remain perpetually green. And the fields will remain perpetually filled with fruitful crops, never having to lie fallow.
While dropping hints throughout, he speaker remains illusive regarding the whereabouts of this place where the sky, the sun, forests and fields, and leaves all behave differently from that of the physical universe that humanity must experience on the earthly plane.
Sestet: Invitation to the Metaphysical Garden
Here is a brighter garden, Where not a frost has been; In its unfading flowers I hear the bright bee hum: Prithee, my brother, Into my garden come!
The speaker now offers some further description of this new place with a new sky and new sun; she then states that that place is “a brighter garden.” As earthly gardens are bright, mystical or metaphysical gardens remain even brighter.
In the metaphysical garden, there is never a fear of “frost” that kills earthly plants with its sting. Flowers will not fade because of frost or from simply aging. The magic of her garden will guarantee that the beauty of the flowers will bloom forth in perpetuity.
Because of the ability of the flowers to remain “unfading,” bees will always be able to partake of their nectar any time they choose. Thus, the speaker avers that she can “hear the bright bee hum.”
The bright bee is, no doubt, brighter than the ordinary, earthly, literal bee. And because of the permanence of her newly created metaphysical garden, she can listen to the pleasant hum any time she wishes.
In the final couplet, the speaker sets forth the clear invitation to her brother, virtually begging him to come into her garden. She employs the archaic expression “[p]rithee” (conflation of “pray thee”) to emphasize her desire that he take her up on her offer to visit her “garden.”
On the literal level, the poet has created a speaker who extends an invitation to the poet’s brother to read her poems. She has offered an alluring set of reasons to try to capture the brother’s imagination and interest.
And to her other readers, the poet has created a speaker to extend that same invitation, as she hopes the notion of a new, permanent, created world will capture their imaginations also.
Dickinson Riddles
Emily Dickinson’s American-Innovative sonnet “There is another sky” is one of the poet’s many riddles. Her speaker never states directly that the garden is her poetry, but still, she is inviting her brother in to read her poems.
The speaker continues to imply throughout the sonnet that she has constructed a whole new world, where things can live unmolested by the irritants that exist on the physical plane of life. The sky can remain “serene and fair”–no storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, heavy rainstorms that frighten and damage.
And the sunshine can present itself even through the darkness. Forests never fade and die out, and the fields remain always bursting with life; they never lie fallow or turn to dust as on the real, earthy plane–that literal world.
The trees can enjoy wearing green leaves and never have to drop them after they turn all brown or rusty. The speaker is privy to all these utopian-sounding acts because she has created it.
And like the master writer of the Shakespeare sonnets, Dickinson’s speaker knows that she has fashioned out of crude, earthly nature an art that will provide pleasure in perpetuity to the minds and hearts of those who have the ability to imagine and intuit along with her.
This speaker further demonstrates a certain level of cheek and courage by inviting her own brother into her creation. While she no doubt quietly wonders if he will be as impressed as she is, she shows a certain level of confidence by offering such an invitation.
Emily Dickinson’s “Some Rainbow – coming from the Fair!”
Introductory summary about 20 words in complete sentences
Introduction and Text of “Some Rainbow – coming from the Fair!”
approximately 100 words
Some Rainbow – coming from the Fair!
Some Rainbow – coming from the Fair!
Some Vision of the World Cashmere –
I confidently see!
Or else a Peacock’s purple Train
Feather by feather – on the plain
Fritters itself away!
The dreamy Butterflies bestir!
Lethargic pools resume the whir
Of last year’s sundered tune!
From some old Fortress on the sun
Baronial Bees – march – one by one –
In murmuring platoon!
The Robins stand as thick today
As flakes of snow stood yesterday –
On fence – and Roof – and Twig!
The Orchis binds her feather on
For her old lover – Don the Sun!
Revisiting the Bog!
Without Commander! Countless! Still!
The Regiments of Wood and Hill
In bright detachment stand!
Behold! Whose Multitudes are these?
The children of whose turbaned seas –
Or what Circassian Land?
Commentary on “Some Rainbow – coming from the Fair!”
approximately 20 words in complete sentences
First Stanza: “Some Rainbow – coming from the Fair!”
The songs and cheerful personality of the late Dolly Parton hold a special place in American music and culture. Her mellifluous voice, clever songwriting, and larger-than-life presence remain a recognizable and delightful experience for listeners across generations.
Although she drew deeply from traditional country themes of home, love, struggle, and faith, her creations virtually always sparkle with originality, humor, and heartfelt wisdom.
Introduction: From Mountain Roots to Worldwide Icon
About the artistry of Dolly Parton, critics and fellow musicians have long noted her rare combination of commercial success and authentic craft. She has been described as one of the greatest singer-songwriters in country music, a performer whose charisma, heartfelt lyrics, and business acumen captured the public’s imagination for nearly six decades [1].
Parton’s experimentation was not primarily with language form but with bridging worlds: pure country storytelling with broader pop accessibility, stage glitter with genuine humility, and personal ambition with public generosity.
Despite—or because of—her flamboyant image of big hair, rhinestones, and self-deprecating jokes about her appearance, her work attracted a wide following. Many of her songs became standards covered across genres. She sold more than 100 million records and ranked among the best-selling female artists of all time [2].
John Logan-style praise executes many parallels in assessments that place Parton among the major lyric voices of her era. Her catalog includes enduring hits that rank with the great love songs, working-class anthems, and autobiographical narratives of any time. Her creations are destined to become American classics.
Excellent commentary on what Dolly means to America:
Early Life
Dolly Rebecca Parton was born on January 19, 1946, in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in Locust Ridge (near Sevierville), Sevier County, Tennessee, to Robert Lee Parton, a sharecropper, farmer, and construction laborer, and Avie Lee Owens Parton [3]. Dolly was the fourth of twelve children in a family she later described as “dirt poor.” Her father could neither read nor write, a fact that later inspired much of her philanthropy. Her mother sang old mountain ballads and church songs, filling the home with music.
The family eventually moved to a two-room cabin without electricity or running water. Music was integral to life in Appalachia. Parton began singing in church at age six and received her first real guitar from an uncle around age eight. She wrote her first song, “Little Tiny Tasseltop,” about a corncob doll with corn-silk hair, when she was about five or six.
By age ten, Parton was performing regularly on local Knoxville radio and television (The Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour). Introduced by Johnny Cash, she made her Grand Ole Opry debut, where she earned several encores [4]. She was only 13 years old at the time.
She recorded early singles, including “Puppy Love,” and signed songwriting deals while still in her teens. After graduating from Sevier County High School in 1964—the first in her immediate family to do so—she left for Nashville the very next day, determined to pursue music full time.
Rise with Porter Wagoner and Solo Breakthrough
In Nashville, Parton signed with Monument Records. Her early single “Dumb Blonde” (1967) reached the country Top 40 and caught the attention of Porter Wagoner. She joined The Porter Wagoner Show that year as the “girl singer,” beginning a highly successful professional partnership. The duo scored numerous Top 10 country hits, and Parton gained national exposure. She also began releasing solo material on RCA.
By the early 1970s, Parton had her first solo No. 1 country hit with “Joshua” (1971). Songs such as “Coat of Many Colors” (drawing on her childhood poverty and a coat her mother made from scraps) showcased her gift for turning personal experience into universal storytelling.
In 1973–1974, seeking full independence, Parton decided to leave Wagoner’s show after seven years. She wrote “I Will Always Love You” as a farewell expression of gratitude and necessity; she has said she may have written it the same day as “Jolene.”
When Parton played the song for Wagoner, he wept, called it the prettiest song he had ever heard, and agreed she could go if he produced it. Both songs became major hits in 1974. “I Will Always Love You” later achieved global pop immortality through Whitney Houston’s version for The Bodyguard [5].
Parton left the Wagoner show in 1974 and built a solo career that expanded into pop crossover territory with albums such as Here You Come Again and the film and title song 9 to 5 (1980), for which she earned Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations.
She starred in films including The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Steel Magnolias, wrote extensively (more than 3,000 songs), and maintained a prolific recording and touring schedule.
Marriage and Private Life
On her first day in Nashville in 1964, Parton met Carl Thomas Dean outside a laundromat. They married on May 30, 1966, in a private ceremony in Ringgold, Georgia. Dean, who ran an asphalt-paving business, remained resolutely private throughout their nearly sixty-year marriage, rarely appearing in public with his famous wife.
The couple had no children. Parton often credited the independence and mutual respect in their relationship for the marriage’s longevity. Carl Dean died on March 3, 2025, at age 82 [6].
Business, Philanthropy, and Later Honors
In 1986, Parton partnered to transform a theme park in Pigeon Forge into Dollywood, which became a major economic engine for the region, attracting millions of visitors annually and creating thousands of jobs. She retained significant ownership and expanded related ventures.
In 1988, she founded the Dollywood Foundation, initially focused on reducing high-school dropout rates in Sevier County through incentives that dramatically improved graduation rates. In 1995, she launched Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, inspired by her father’s illiteracy.
The Imagination Library mails free, age-appropriate books monthly to enrolled children from birth to age five. By the time of Parton’s death, it had gifted more than 300 million books across the United States and several other countries.
Unfortunately, one action that is likely to remain a lasting stain on Parton’s otherwise exemplary reputation was her $1 million donation [7] during the COVID-19 pandemic to Vanderbilt University Medical Center research that helped advance the Moderna mRNA vaccine. Furthermore unfortunately, she also publicly promoted that dangerous vaccination and even reworked her classic hit “Jolene” into a pro-vaccine novelty song.
Subsequent rigorous evidence has established that the Moderna vaccine carries a causal risk of myocarditis and pericarditis (highest in adolescent and young adult males, and even higher than the Pfizer product in several analyses), along with excess serious adverse events of special interest, identified in re-analyses of the original randomized trials.
On the positive site, however, she supported disaster relief, medical facilities in her home region, scholarships, and conservation efforts such as an eagle sanctuary at Dollywood. In 2022, her foundation received $100 million from Jeff Bezos’s Courage and Civility Award to distribute as she chose.
Parton was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame [8] in 2022. She received the National Medal of Arts, Kennedy Center Honors, Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and numerous competitive Grammys, CMA, and ACM awards. She was named CMA Entertainer of the Year and earned the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
Death of the Artist
At age 80, after a brief battle with cancer, on August 25, 2026, Dolly Parton died at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville. Earlier in the year, she had canceled a series of performances she was scheduled to give in Las Vegas due to health issues.
Her family announced that she died peacefully, surrounded by loved ones. Glowing tributes have continued to pour in from across the field of music and from other public sectors, celebrating her as an extraordinary figure of joy, integrity, and generosity [9].
At the time of her death, Parton was widely regarded as one of the most beloved and accomplished performers in American popular culture—a songwriter of pleasing consistency, an entertainer of outstanding ability and warmth.
Parton was also a shrewd business woman, and a philanthropist, whose Imagination Library alone will continue to place books in children’s hands for years to come. In a 2019 interview [10] with Jenna Bush Hager, Parton said,
My dad was the smartest person I ever knew, but he couldn’t read and write, and that always bothered him. It troubled him. So I wanted to do something so my dad could be proud, and Daddy got to live long enough to hear the kids call me the “Book Lady,” and he was as proud of that as me being a star, and that meant so much to him. So I felt like I brought honor to my dad through that.
Thus Parton’s reputation as a “book lady” will likely endure just as so many of her songs will. Her grace, her intelligence, and her sheer star power that has continued to affect so many people around the world render her a phenomenon that will prove to elevate many of her songs to the status of American classics.
The literary world has always depended upon readers who believe that books are more than cultural artifacts. Liza Libes is one such reader, writer, poet, and cultural critic.
Her work has emerged from a deep affection for literature and from a growing conviction that great books should be read as works of art that illuminate the human condition rather than merely as vehicles for contemporary political arguments.
Through her writing, teaching, videos, podcasts, and literary project Pens and Poison, Libes has become an increasingly visible voice in the discussion of literature and the future of literary education.
Introduction: Restoring Literature to the Humanistic Tradition
Liza Libes describes herself as a writer and cultural critic. She earned both a B.A. and an M.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, studying the poetry of Sylvia Plath as an undergraduate and T. S. Eliot as a graduate student [1].
Her academic training gave her an unusually close acquaintance with the literary tradition, but her experience in the university also produced the central question that has shaped much of her subsequent work: What happens to literature when political theory becomes more important than literature itself?
Libes has argued that contemporary literary study has become too heavily dependent upon ideological approaches. In a 2024 essay, “Why I Am Not a PhD,” she describes becoming increasingly dissatisfied with an approach in which works such as The Great Gatsby or The Canterbury Tales were primarily approached through political themes. She concluded that she was being taught to discuss political literary theory rather than to study literature itself [2].
Her criticism is not simply a rejection of literary theory in general. Libes explicitly states that she does not advocate eliminating theory from universities. Her objection is to what she regards as the disproportionate influence of political and ideological frameworks over the actual literary works. For Libes, literature possesses a purpose that transcends contemporary political disputes: it can reveal universal truths about human nature and at the human condition.
This conviction became the foundation for Pens and Poison, the literary project she established after leaving graduate study. The project describes its mission as resisting the assumption that literature must be interpreted through political lenses and refocusing attention upon the humanistic tradition [3]. In this respect, Libes has positioned herself not merely as a critic of contemporary literary education but as an advocate for the recovery of the appreciation for literature itself.
Early Life and the Love of Literature
Libes has written that her desire to become a writer began when she was a young child. In describing her childhood, she recalls spending time creating stories and entering imaginative worlds of her own invention. Writing was not initially a career calculation; it was a natural expression of her imagination [4].
As she grew older, her childhood stories gave way to an increasing interest in serious fiction and the literary classics. She developed a particular affection for authors whose works investigate the psychological and moral dimensions of human existence. Among her most important literary influences are Sylvia Plath and T. S. Eliot, the subjects of her undergraduate and graduate theses at Columbia University.
Libes’ academic career therefore began from genuine enthusiasm for literature. She did not enter the university as someone hostile to literary scholarship. On the contrary, she hoped to become an English professor. In her account of her experience at Columbia, she recalls imagining herself as a future literature professor standing before a classroom and discussing poetry with students [5]. That ambition gradually changed.
As she progressed through her university education, Libes became increasingly concerned about what she regarded as the dominance of ideological criticism in literary studies. In one autobiographical account, she explains that she began questioning approaches that seemed to reduce literary works to political arguments about race, class, gender, capitalism, or social power.
Her disagreement became particularly significant and galling for her because she continued to love the books themselves. The issue was not whether political questions could ever be discussed in connection with literature. Rather, she questioned whether those questions should displace the literary, moral, psychological, and aesthetic dimensions of a work.
Columbia University and the Turning Point
After completing her B.A. at Columbia University, Libes graduate work culminated in an M.A. thesis examining T. S. Eliot and Wagnerian parallels. Her academic experience, however, eventually convinced her that she did not want to pursue the traditional academic career she had once imagined.
In “Proud Not to Be PhD,” Libes describes finishing her master’s thesis during the pandemic in 2020 and leaving graduate study with her degree but without the academic future she had once expected. She describes the decision as liberating. Rather than becoming a professor within a literary system she had come to distrust, she began looking for ways to engage readers directly.
Her essay “The Year I Quit Reading” provides an even more personal account of this transition. Libes describes reaching a point at which she found herself unable to read major works without automatically applying the theoretical frameworks she had encountered in the academy.
Instead of meeting and enjoying a novel or poem as a work of art, she found herself searching for Marxist, postcolonial, feminist, or other ideological interpretations [6]. This experience effected an important turning point; she wanted to reclaim the pleasure of reading. She wanted to experience literature again as literature.
Pens and Poison
Because of that conviction, Libes created Pens and Poison, a multi-platform literary project designed to encourage readers to appreciate literature and the written word as works of art instead of target practice for ideological arrows.
The project includes articles, essays, videos, podcasts, and other forms of online literary discussion. Its stated purpose is to challenge—even refute— the assumption that literature must be understood through predetermined political categories and to redirect attention toward the humanistic tradition as preserved in letters.
The project has also given Libes a direct relationship with a contemporary audience. According to her biographical sketch, Pens and Poison reaches more than 140,000 Instagram followers and more than 45,000 YouTube subscribers. Her work has thus moved beyond the traditional academic audience of literary criticism and into the much larger world of online readers.
In 2024, Pens and Poison also introduced a magazine intended to provide young poets and writers with a platform for their work [7]. Through this work, Libes is not merely criticizing contemporary literary culture. She is attempting to build an alternative literary community in which young writers can read, write, discuss, and appreciate literature without first having to adopt a particular political interpretation.
Criticism of Postmodern Literary Study
One of the defining themes in Libes’ criticism is her objection to the postmodern assumptions she believes have become influential in university English departments.
In “Why Contemporary Publishing Is Broken,” Libes argues that postmodern approaches have helped establish several assumptions in literary study: that meaning is relative, that authorial intention is irrelevant, and that claims to universal truth are inherently suspect [8].
She believes these assumptions have consequences beyond the classroom because university graduates frequently enter publishing, education, and the broader literary world.
Her argument is especially concerned with the relationship between literary criticism and the purpose of literature. According to Libes, if students are trained to regard every literary work primarily as a product of social power or political ideology, they may lose the ability to ask what a work says about human beings themselves. Her alternative is a humanistic understanding of literature.
Libes argues that great literature can teach readers about human nature precisely because individual stories can reveal universal experiences. In discussing the classics, she has rejected the idea that a work loses its value simply because its author belongs to a demographic group with which a contemporary reader does not personally identify [9].
For Libes, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Eliot, Plath, and other major writers remain worth reading because literature can cross boundaries of time, culture, sex, class, and nationality. A reader does not have to resemble an author in order to discover something true in that author’s work. This belief is central to her criticism of contemporary literary education.
The Case for Humanistic Literature
Libes’ criticism is ultimately constructive. She does not merely want to identify what she believes is wrong with literary education; she wants to restore something she believes has been lost.
In her essay “The Case for Humanistic Literature,” she examines Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and connects the novel to the older humanistic tradition of Western literature [10]. She argues that literature has historically served purposes larger than entertainment. Great works can force readers to confront questions about morality, meaning, civilization, suffering, virtue, and the nature of human existence.
Her essay “How Postmodernism Killed Great Literature” develops the same argument. There she contends that literature should not merely provide an open-ended space for ideological interpretation but should help readers think about what constitutes a good and meaningful life [11].
This argument is perhaps the most important feature of Libes’ criticism: her opposition to ideological literary interpretation grows out of her belief that literature matters. She objects to political reductionism because she believes books are capable of doing something more profound.
Writing, Poetry, and Education
Libes’ literary interests extend beyond criticism. She is also a poet and writer whose work has appeared in literary journals and publications including Persuasion, The American Spectator, the Jewish Book Council, and others.
She has published poetry collections including Broken Weekend, Vintage Lovers, and Illicit Kingdom, plus another very recently published collection, Girl Soldier. Her poetry addresses subjects including identity, Judaism, desire, and other dimensions of personal experience.
Libes has also made education an important part of her professional life. She founded Invictus Prep, a college-consulting company through which she works with students on writing and college preparation [12]. The company describes her work as helping students develop their writing and intellectual abilities while guiding them through the college-application process.
Her concern about declining writing ability among students has also become part of her public criticism. In “Why Can’t Our Kids Write?,” Libes describes working with college-bound teenagers and observing what she considers a troubling decline in students’ ability to write effectively [13]. Her criticism therefore extends beyond literary interpretation to the larger question of whether young people are being adequately prepared to read, think, and communicate.
A New Kind of Literary Critic
Liza Libes represents an unusual figure in contemporary literary culture. She possesses the academic credentials of a traditional literary scholar but has chosen not to remain within the conventional academic system. Instead, she has taken literary criticism into the online world.
Her work combines scholarship, poetry, cultural criticism, education, entrepreneurship, and social media. Through Pens and Poison, she communicates with an audience far larger than the readership normally associated with academic literary criticism. Her importance may ultimately lie in this combination.
Libes is not arguing that literary studies should become less intellectual. She is arguing that it should become more fully intellectual by returning to questions of meaning, truth, beauty, morality, psychology, and the human condition. Her criticism of postmodern literary study is therefore part of a broader argument about what education is supposed to accomplish.
For Libes, literature should not merely train students to identify ideological categories. It should teach them how to see. It should enlarge the imagination. It should deepen the reader’s understanding of other people and of himself. And above all, it should remain literature.
The Libesian Opposition
The case against Liza Libes is strikingly insubstantial: one published polemic built on factual reductionism and personal contempt, followed by the usual anonymous online sneering masquerading as critique.
Karen Myers’ November 2025 post at Mad Genius Club [14] is the centerpiece of the attack. It dismisses one of Libes’s essays as a “heartfelt entitlement/industry whine” and portrays her as “young and snobbish,” sneering that she has “only” three poetry collections and supposedly lacks any understanding of the market.
This assertion is not a serious rebuttal of Libes’s claims; it is a credential-counting exercise designed to imply that a writer may not criticize literary institutions unless she has first accumulated whatever résumé Myers considers sufficiently substantial.
That framing is especially evasive given Libes’s actual record. She has cultivated a sizeable independent audience across Instagram and YouTube, built a Substack that reached bestseller status, published essays in The Boston Globe, Persuasion, and The Daily Wire, and continued to produce fiction, poetry, and cultural criticism.
Pretending that her career can be reduced to “only three poetry collections” is not analysis; it is selective accounting deployed to make the writer look unserious. Myers’ objection ultimately appears less concerned with whether Libes is right about ideological conformity in academia and publishing than with the fact that Libes still takes conventional literary prestige seriously.
On an indie-publishing site, that ambition is recast as vanity or delusion. But treating an author’s aspiration to serious literary recognition as proof of incompetence is not a factual refutation; it is an ideological preference, expressed with the confidence of a verdict.
Beyond that post, the opposition largely disintegrates into drive-by abuse: social-media insults, vague insinuations, and the occasional YouTube comment declaring Libes “full of herself.” None of it meaningfully addresses her arguments about political gatekeeping, institutional conformity, or the narrowing range of acceptable viewpoints in literary and academic culture.
The so-called critics do not defeat her analysis; they mostly avoid it, substituting irritation at her visibility and ambition for an actual argument. The weak responses of these ideological critics demonstrate more about their self-aggrandizement than about the target of their criticism.
The Sovereign-Citizen Movement: A Dangerous Fantasy
The sovereign-citizen movement claims that a citizen may, through the filing of the right document or the recitation of the right phrase, remain exempt from the jurisdiction of the government that protects him while still enjoying the roads, courts, and public safety that government through taxation of other citizens provides.
That contradiction is not a harmless eccentricity; instead it is a belief system that the FBI has formally classified as a domestic terrorist movement, one that has cost police officers their lives and landed ordinary practitioners in prison, foreclosure, or worse.
Example of a “sovereign citizen” being arrested in front of her daughter:
Introduction: A Movement without a Charter
Unlike a militia or a political party, and somewhat like Antifa, the sovereign-citizen movement has no headquarters, no membership card, and no single leader. Federal investigators describe sovereign-citizen extremists as a domestic terrorist movement that has persisted for decades, counting among its ranks Terry Nichols, a co-conspirator in the Oklahoma City bombing.
Sovereign citizens are not organized as an anarchist faction or a militia, though some acquire illegal weapons[1]; instead they act as individuals who occasionally cluster into loose, leaderless groups to trade paperwork tips and reinforce one another’s ideology. That looseness is precisely what makes the movement so difficult to track and so easy to underestimate.
The Ideology: Strawman, Freeman, Fictional Escape Hatch
At bottom, sovereign citizens reject the legitimacy of the government under which they live. Believers deny that government has any authority over them and insist they cannot be required to obey the law or answer for breaking it. In practice, this typically means refusing to register vehicles, obtain driver licenses, carry insurance, or pay taxes.
Adherents dress this refusal in pseudo-legal costume: invented “traveler’s” credentials, fictitious license plates from self-declared republics, and filings sprinkled with copyright symbols and phrases like “without prejudice” meant to strip a signature of legal force.
The FBI’s own reference materials catalog these habits—fraudulent plates and IDs, self-styled titles such as “freeman” or “flesh and blood,” and demands that officials produce an “oath of office” or “bond” before being obeyed—as red flags of the ideology in action.
None of it holds up in any American courtroom. Judges dismiss it, and dismiss it fast. The tragedy is how many people stake their liberty, their homes, and occasionally their lives on paperwork that can never work [2] .
Hazard One: Paper Terrorism
The mildest expression of the ideology is bureaucratic sabotage—so common it has earned its own name. Believers harass public officials with baseless legal threats intended to intimidate and to grind government functions to a halt. Sovereign citizens fabricate their own currency and legal documents, file frivolous or harassing lawsuits, and simply ignore court orders they dislike [3].
Clerks, judges, and county recorders bear the brunt of this—buried under liens filed against their personal property, threatened with private “arrest,” or accused of treason for doing their jobs. It is petty, but it is not nothing. It consumes court time, public resources, and the peace of mind of civil servants who signed up to process deeds, not fend off vigilante tribunals.
Hazard Two: Escalation to Violence
Paper terrorism is the entry point, not the ceiling. Sovereign citizens were connected to fifteen percent of FBI-designated domestic terrorism incidents recorded between 2015 and 2019, and most of those incidents turned violent.
The FBI itself warns that sovereign-citizen crime can escalate as far as assault or murder—a warning grimly confirmed on May 20, 2010, near West Memphis, Arkansas. A routine traffic stop turned lethal when Jerry Kane [4], a self-described sovereign citizen, and his sixteen-year-old son Joseph opened fire on the officers who had pulled them over, killing both officers.
Officer Bill Evans was struck fourteen times and Sergeant Brandon Paudert eleven, in an ambush that shocked a nation already wary of “deep state” paranoia and anti-government fury.
The Kanes died in a shootout hours later in a Walmart parking lot. Before the killings, Jerry Kane had made his intentions plain: he told an associate he did not want to kill anyone, but that if law enforcement kept “messing with me,” he would have to, and once he started, he would not be able to stop.
Those words are not the language of a harmless hobbyist filing strange paperwork. It is the language of a man who had convinced himself the badge on the officer’s chest carried no authority over him—and who acted accordingly.
Similar confrontations have unfolded from Louisiana to Texas to Wisconsin, a pattern sober enough that law enforcement magazines now train recruits specifically to recognize the movement’s warning signs [5].
Hazard Three: Financial Predation
Sovereignty is also a business. In one Nevada investigation, four men tied to the movement were arrested on federal money-laundering, tax-evasion, and weapons charges after allegedly laundering more than a million dollars while charging fees for their “services” [6].
The pitch is seductive: pay us, and we will show you how to erase your debts, evade your taxes, or file a lien that magically discharges your mortgage. It never works, and the believer is often left facing federal charges of his own, on top of whatever losses the scam artist pocketed along the way.
Toward Vigilance, Not Amusement
It is tempting to laugh off the sovereign citizen as a colorful crank—the fellow arguing with a judge that he is a “flesh-and-blood man” beyond the state’s jurisdiction. The temptation should be resisted. A belief system that convinces its adherents the law simply does not apply to them will, sooner or later, produce a Jerry Kane: someone prepared to treat an ordinary traffic stop as an act of war.
Law enforcement now trains for that possibility, and rightly so. The rest of us would do well to understand the ideology clearly enough to recognize it—not as satire, but as the domestic threat the FBI has long said it is.
The Ern Malley poetry hoax was perpetrated by two poets who disdained the avant-garde style of modernism. They planned to debunk what they considered was fraudulent and demeaning to the art.
A Brief Overview of the Hoax
The Ern Malley affair is one the most interesting literary hoaxes of the 20th century. It grew out of a hatred of and the desire to debunk the avant-garde style of modernism.
In October 1943 on a Saturday, two traditional poets, Lieutenant James McAuley and Corporal Harold Stewart, in their offices at the Victoria Barracks of the Australian Army in Melbourne, Australia, hatched their plan.
They concocted a plan to expose the bankruptcy of the modernist avant-garde trend of literature in British, Australian, and world poetry. They chose the publication titled Angry Penguins and one of the editors Max Harris as their targets.
As the legend recounts it, within a few hours on that ordinary Saturday, the two young army men had slapped together sixteen poems by collecting strings of words from the books and magazines that lay on their desks [1]. The following example begins with the first three lines lifted verbatim from a US Army report on mosquito control:
Culture as Exhibit
“Swamps, marshes, borrow-pits and other Areas of stagnant water serve As breeding-grounds …” Now Have I found you, my Anopheles! (There is a meaning for the circumspect) Come, we will dance sedate quadrilles, A pallid polka or a yelping shimmy Over these sunken sodden breeding-grounds! We will be wraiths and wreaths of tissue-paper To clog the Town Council in their plans. Culture forsooth! Albert, get my gun.
After completing their first sixteen fake pieces, McAuley and Stewart then delivered a fictitious poet from the womb of mischief and named him “Ern Malley,” a take-off on the French word “mal” meaning bad.
Next, McAuley and Stewart invented a sister and called her Ethel, dreamed up a melancholy biography for the deceased auto mechanic turned insurance salesman poet, which Ethel would narrate, and they were all set. From the hands of Ethel, McAuley and Stewart posted ole Ern’s poems and biography to the magazine Angry Penguins.
Max Harris [2] flipped over the poems, as did the other editors, and a special edition of Angry Penguins carried the fake poems and the fake biography of the fake poet. The two disgruntled poets, Lieutenant James McAuley and Corporal Harold Stewart, had accomplished their mission.
They had demonstrated for the world that those editors, critics, and readers who are taken in by the avant-garde, surrealistic drivel flowing from the pens of literary poetasters under the guise of modernism could be easily exposed by a real fake.
The Nonsense of Modernist Poetry
As poets, Lieutenant James McAuley and Corporal Harold Stewart had come to despise the poetry of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, and other modernist poets. McAuley and Stewart, therefore, deemed the entire modernist movement “pretentious nonsense.”
Thus the pair then hatched their plan to expose the nonsense. They believed they could fool editors into publishing anything that smacked of the same “nonsense” they had been observing in literary mags. So, they would write fake poems and submit them. They concocted three rules that they would follow as they composed their deliberately fake works:
There must be no coherent theme, at most, only confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning held out as a bait to the reader.
No care was taken with verse technique, except occasionally to accentuate its general sloppiness by deliberate crudities.
In style, the poems were to imitate, not Mr. Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece and others.
Based on these rules, the poems of Ern Malley were born.
Poor Max Harris, who was not a bad poet, and whose early poems were, in fact, quite traditional in form, faced a court trial for publishing the Ern Malley poems, which were considered obscene. Harris paid a fine, and his jail time was suspended.
Still Harris’ reputation was less sullied than that of the Malley creators. Actually, McAuley and Stewart simply suffered from anonymity, with their only claim to fame being the Ern Malley hoax.
Sample Pieces from the Collection
A fascinating and useful study might result from elucidating how each piece in the hoax collection demonstrates the three “rules” that the poets were constrained to follow in composing the fake works. The following “sonnets” offer a glimpse at the style and subject that the Ern Malley collection of hoax poems perpetrated upon the literary world:
Sonnets for the Novachord
(i.) Rise from the wrist, o kestrel Mind, to a clear expanse. Perform your high dance On the clouds of ancestral Duty. Hawk at the wraith Of remembered emotions. Vindicate our high notions Of a new and pitiless faith. It is not without risk! In a lofty attempt The fool makes a brisk Tumble. Rightly contempt Rewards the cloud-foot unwary Who falls to the prairie.
(ii.) Poetry: the loaves and fishes, Or no less miracle; For in this deft pentacle We imprison our wishes.
Though stilled to alabaster This Ichthys shall swim From the mind’s disaster On the volatile hymn.
If this be the norm Of our serious frolic There’s no remorse:
Our magical force Cleaves the ignorant storm On the hyperbolic.
There is much more to this convoluted caper, including intriguing biographical information about all the parties involved—especially McAuley, Steward, and Harris. The following is a list of titles contained in the Ern Malley poems, composed by McAuley and Stewart and sent to Angry Penguins:
Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495
Sonnets for the Novachord
Sweet William
Boult to Marina
Sybilline
Night Piece
Documentary Film
Palinode
Night-piece (Alternate Version)
Baroque Exterior
Perspective Lovesong
Culture as Exhibit
Egyptian Register
Young Prince of Tyre
Colloquy with John Keats (and Coda)
Petit Testament
An additional publication is Michael Heyward’s The Ern Malley Affair, which sheds light on the entire caper [4].
The Art of Living Life as a Poet: A Response to Braciamore’s “Why poets cannot be lovers”
My essay “The Art of Living Life as a Poet” offers a response to Beatrice Braciamore’s essay “Why poets cannot be lovers,” which is a loose musing on the tensions between poetic reflection and lived experience. Often inelegantly phrased but drawing upon respectable sources such as Pirandello and Thomas Mann, the piece ultimately loses itself, resting upon a romanticized false dichotomy.
Human Consciousness Requires Retrospection
Braciamore’s awkwardly structured piece is suggesting that the poet’s retrospective gaze necessarily alienates the poet from authentic living and loving. This view, convoluted as it is, also undervalues the poet’s capacity for integrated consciousness and grossly mischaracterizes the role of intensity in human relationships.
Braciamore defines art as a “summary of the retrospective view the poet has on reality,” positioning poetry as thought rendered into structured words. From this sterile definition, she concludes that constant analysis curses the poet with overthinking.
She then cites Pirandello’s notion that “to know ourselves is to die.” Yet her facile interpretation stretches the quotation. Pirandello explores the absurdity of fixed identity, not a blanket prohibition against reflection.
Human consciousness requires retrospection; without it, experience remains unprocessed and shallow. The poet does not stand outside life but engages it more fully by shaping its raw material into form. Far from a withdrawal, this process often deepens participation.
As T.S. Eliot argued in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” the poet’s mind is a catalyst that transforms emotion and experience into something universal without sacrificing sincerity.
Dangerous Detachment
The claim that “art for art’s sake” leads to dangerous detachment also warrants scrutiny. While excess can distort, the Aesthetic Movement, as articulated by Wilde, defended beauty against crude moralizing or utilitarian reduction. It did not demand abandonment of reality but rather insisted that art’s primary fidelity is to aesthetic truth.
Many poets have thrived by integrating this sensibility with passionate engagement. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese demonstrate how poetic craft can intensify rather than dilute romantic love. The verses do not aestheticize the belovèd into irrelevance; they exalt the belovèd making the love more vivid and enduring.
Similarly, the Romantic poets—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley—channeled intense personal experience into art without becoming mere spectators. Their lives were often complex and vital, not coldly observational.
Braciamore further posits that when everything becomes potentially beautiful, nothing stands out as uniquely loved, rendering muses mere expedients for creation. This view risks conflating discernment with indifference.
The true poet does not flatten experience but refines and enhances it. Finding poetry in the ordinary does not preclude singular devotion; it deeply enriches it. Possessing talent and skill in writing poetry does not limit human ability but broadens it according to the depth of spiritual devotion of the dedicated poet.
Engagement, not Suppression
Dante’s Beatrice was both muse and spiritual guide, her influence profoundly real rather than purely instrumental. The notion that genuine love for an poet must be “un-poetic” and grounding—essentially pulling the poet out of their nature—carries an implicit devaluation of heightened sensibility.
Why assume ordinary lightness is superior to luminous intensity? Many individuals seek relationships that elevate consciousness rather than mute it. A worthy partner engages the poet’s vision instead of demanding its suppression.
The essay’s appeal to Greek tragedy as a model for “controlled catharsis” against hubris is relevant but applied too narrowly. Tragedy does not counsel moderation by diminishing feeling; it affirms the grandeur and terror of human passion while revealing its excesses.
Aristotle’s Poetics presents catharsis as emotional clarification, not evacuation. Poets who embrace dramatic sensibility are not necessarily inauthentic; they may simply refuse the numbness that characterizes much of modern routine existence.
The real cultural problem, as critics of postmodern relativism have noted, is often the opposite: a flattening of meaning where skepticism devolves into nihilism and all values become interchangeable “narratives.” Note that Braciamore states, “anything can be art, and anyone can be an [sic] poet.” Such flattening reduces art to nothingness, and from this stance comes the absurd notion that “a poem can mean anything you want it to mean.”
This critique aligns with broader concerns about relativism’s influence on art and culture. When experience is reduced solely to personal “truths” without reference to shared reality or enduring form, both poetry and relationships suffer.
Braciamore’s call to “drop the act” occasionally has merit as a guard against self-indulgence, but it should not become a prescription for poets to abandon their distinctive mode of being. The solution lies in balance and self-awareness, not in trading poetic vision for prosaic grounding.
Poets Love Deeply
History demonstrates that poets can and do love deeply. The correspondences between Robert and Elizabeth Browning reveal a union of minds and hearts that fueled, rather than hindered, their creative output.
Frida Kahlo’s relationship with Diego Rivera, though turbulent, produced art inseparable from lived passion. These examples suggest that the poetic temperament, when mature, enhances rather than obstructs connection.
Braciamore concludes by encouraging readers to love poets in ways that help them escape obsession. A more constructive approach recognizes that the poetic life, with its retrospective depth, offers a richer engagement with reality.
The challenge is not to diminish poetic consciousness but to ensure it remains tethered to truth, empathy, and genuine encounter. In an age prone to fragmented perspectives and diminished meaning, the poet’s ability to find form and beauty remains not a curse but a vital gift.
Rather than asking poets to love less poetically, we might ask them—and their partners—to love with full awareness: attentive to both the retrospective glance and the living moment. This integrated approach honors the complexity of human experience without forcing a false choice between art and life.
