The Muse in the Machine: Essays on Poetry and the Anatomy of the Body Politic

What is poetry for? More broadly, what function does art play in our world? These are the questions that animate these essays, which form an extended meditation on the role of art in an advanced civilization. Hummer poses answers that involve not only art but conscience. The essays were written over the last decade and a half and are all presented in an immediate and thoughtful style. Two of the essays, " 'Sen-Sen,' Censorship, Obscenity, Secrecy: Slapping the Face of the Body Politic" and "Ex Machina: Reading the Mind of the South," especially rise above the specific situations that inspired them—the controversy over NEA funding in the early 1990s and W.J. Cash's classic The Mind of the South, respectively—to deliver insightful consideration of dilemmas that are still with us today. At the heart of Hummer's project lies the injunction to the American superpower of which the author (editor of the Georgia Review ) is a part: "if language is the flesh of the body politic... we all had better watch very carefully indeed what we say, and beware of where it goes." (Apr. 25)