“Read some Byron, Shelley and Keats, Recited it over a hip-hop beat.”
This lyric, from Natasha Bedingfield’s hyper-saccharine 2004 song “These Words” made me believe that cringey literary references to the old romantics had climaxed nearly 20 years ago. How wrong I was.
“Hold my kombucha!” shrieks someone called Susan Wolfson (apparently an English teacher at somewhere called Princeton) who writes for the bottomless well of shit-takes known as The Atlantic magazine.
Her article is entitled “Byron, Shelley, and Now Zelensky.”
Yes, I felt you shudder. But we’re in this together, now.
“Professor” Wolfson could not help but… profess… in her second paragraph that “[w]e live in different times,” than the early 1800s. A cunning and essential observation. I’d have never known, were it not for the observational skills of Ms. Wolfson, that we do not, in fact, inhabit the 19th century. Phew.
To avoid such writing pitfalls, I’d recommend Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, however I suspect the his aversion to cancel culture makes him a “baddie” at Princeton nowadays. Plus, you know, we lived in “different times.”
“We only have to turn to Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, to see how the poetry of politics lives on,” Wolfson proclaims (or does she profess?) before citing examples of why this comedian-oligarch deserves to be held in the same esteem as Keats, Coleridge, or even Natasha Bedingfield.
“The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.” This bit of extemporaneous poetry was reported to have been spoken on February 25, 2022, by Zelensky in response to a supposed offer from the American ambassador to shuttle him and his family to safety out of Kyiv.
The oft-quoted line is of course as real as the Ghost of Kiev i.e. not at all, but that doesn’t stop Wolfson:
The first sentence sounds the alarm in a portentous poetic rhythm (The fight is here). The second sentence repeats the urgency in the same meters, its colloquial turn capturing his gift for performative comedy (I need ammunition, not a ride). “Not a ride” is breezy talk—yet also darkly sardonic. The wording was practically made for Twitter, and the first indication that a special kind of eloquence would become a weapon in this conflict.
This may be the first time someone I assumed to be serious has held up a line being “made for Twitter” as a good thing. Perhaps Wolfson has passed her sell-by-date as an English professor. Maybe even as an English speaker. She then lauds the clumsy war propaganda from the following day:
“I am here. We are not putting down arms. We will be defending our country, because our weapon is truth, and our truth is that this is our land, our country, our children, and we will defend all of this … That is it. That’s all I wanted to tell you. Glory to Ukraine.”
– Volodymyr Zelensky, February 2022
“…he channels Thomas Paine, Winston Churchill, and John F. Kennedy,” Wolfson insists. But in doing so, she gives away more about the man and his “resistance” than she might like.
Zelensky’s “poetry” manages to be both derivative and generic, while Wolfson’s contention gives away his entire strategy in the first months of the war: pathos.
The oligarch-backed, Kiev frontman went to extreme lengths, early doors, to corral Western media and politicians. There were lots of interviews, Zoom meetings, parliamentary addresses, and TikTok-friendly moments. What there wasn’t a whole lot of was long-term strategy. Which is why many now are beginning to admit this war is not “winnable” from Ukraine’s perspective.
Yet, for the first few months Westerners were blinded by the lies: the Ukrainian superpilot who shot down more planes than Russia even has; the video game footage passed off as Russians getting BTFO; even the still-prevalent narrative that Ukrainian Nazis are way, way different from German Nazis and that we shouldn’t worry about them at all!
Now the dust has quite literally settled, Zelenksy’s theatrics amounted to prolonging the suffering at a primary cost to his own people and to the increasingly skeptical U.S. taxpayer. By the by, you’re up to at least $55 billion at this point, which you could’ve spent building Trump’s border wall about six times over.
Even the corporate press is beginning to question the U.S. involvement, with ABC in Australia this week asking: “Is excessive funding from the US escalating the conflict with Russia in Ukraine?”
Yes. The short answer is yes.
Wolfson, since we have to come back to her, concludes:
And so Volodymyr Zelensky—like Byron, a skilled public speaker, a satirist, an entertainer—fulfills one Byronic dream. If Byron was first a poet, then a celebrity, then a political activist in Italy, then a political force in a war of independence in the same time zone as Ukraine, Zelensky brings it all together as the genuine Byronic hero of our times. Here is a celebrity entertainer who played a fictional president on television, then was himself elected president, then in a national crisis used a comedian’s knack for concision and punch to become a leader of consequence, and an international hero.
Cute. Twee, actually. And also extremely derivative. Ahem.
Wolfson’s teenage crush scribblings may have meant something early on in the war. Before people bothered to delve into what was actually going on, and why America was involved in the first instance.
And since her online biography insists that “she cares about Milton and Shakespeare too,” perhaps she would find the equally over-quoted Macbeth of better use when describing Zelensky’s war:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
