Knee-jerk anti-Corbynism

WorldbyStorm

Jun 30

Sure, it's online and on twitter so perhaps that says it all. But this is just stupid.

It's not the first time Jeremy Corbyn has quoted verse XXXVIII of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Masque of Anarchy. He recited it on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury in 2017 in those innocent days when singing "Oh Jeremy Corbyn" to the tune of the White Stripes' Seven Nation Army was popular and Boris Johnson had never presented his prime ministerial credentials to the Queen. Yesterday Corbyn posted that same verse on Twitter, using it to plug his and Len McCluskey's looming anthology, Poetry for the Many, which can be preordered online by right-thinking lefties, though ideally, you'd think, not from Amazon.

Guess what:

Twitter was not impressed with the poem which, alarmingly, many took to be the work of the former Labour leader and still MP for Islington North. "Good heavens this is baaaaad," tweeted uthekwane. "The whole poem is utterly dreadful and the scansion is totally broken but that use of 'ye' is the most pretentious shit imaginable," tweeted Danielle Blake. "Vogons wept," she added in another tweet. Vogons, you recall, are slug-like humanoids from Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They destroyed Earth to build an intergalactic superhighway. And they are known for their bloody awful poetry. Another critic was mystified at the obsolete language: "Why the ye though? You would be fine. Why bring in the ye?" Perhaps the critic thought Corbyn was name-checking Kanye West, which would be cool. Lady Contrary Mary tweeted, possibly correctly, "This is a poem by someone who knows fuckall about lions." I'm going to go out on a limb and claim that Lady Mary is no more an actual zoologist than I am. Did Shelley know anything about lions? Does Corbyn? And is this line of criticism decisive in evaluating the poem's worth? These are deep questions for profounder minds than mine.

As Stewart Jeffries notes 'What is striking about the response to Corbyn's Shelley tweet is that it is not so much the lions that are rising in unvanquishable number on Elon Musk's platform, but the unapologetic age of stupid.' And the first stupid is assuming that Corbyn wrote the piece he recited. But the second is in not bothering to take a moments effort to discover that inconvenient fact. One doesn't have to think Corbyn the hero of the age to believe that there's an absurd pile on against him for usually no good reasons. This is just another manifestation of same.

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