In an age of pervasive surveillance and social media promotion, reading poetry matters more than ever as we try to come to terms with our technologica

Poetry as a surveillance survival guide

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2021-07-15 03:00:06

In an age of pervasive surveillance and social media promotion, reading poetry matters more than ever as we try to come to terms with our technologically-led society

During the twentieth century, the FBI closely monitored poets, read their work, and speculated about their political and artistic intentions. American surveillance agencies even hired people with backgrounds in poetry to be spies and code breakers because of their skills in close reading, language analysis and critical thinking.

From Yale’s 1943 graduating class alone, at least forty-two young Bachelor of Arts students entered intelligence work for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime forerunner of the CIA.

As historian Robin W. Winks observes in his 1987 book Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961, many of these were English graduates who could apply literary techniques to intelligence analysis and cryptic expressions.

While it’s hard to think of poets as spies, poetry and surveillance actually use very similar styles of information gathering such as close observation, abstraction, subversion, fragmentation and symbolism.

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