“Symptomatic of this change is how seriously students now take the famous passages on musical education in Plato’s Republic. In the past, students, good liberals that they always are, were indignant at the censorship of poetry, as a threat to free inquiry. But they were really thinking of science and politics. They hardly paid attention to the discussion of music itself and, to the extent that they even thought about it, were really puzzled by Plato’s devoting time to rhythm and melody in a serious treatise on political philosophy. Their experience of music was as an entertainment, a matter of indifference to political and moral life. Students today, on the contrary, know exactly why Plato takes music so seriously. They know it affects life very profoundly and are indignant because Plato seems to want to rob them of their most intimate pleasure. They are drawn into argument with Plato about the experience of music, and the day centers on how to evaluate it and deal with it. This encounter not only helps to illuminate the phenomenon of contemporary music, but also provides a model of how contemporary students can profitably engage with a classic text. The very fact of their fury shows how much Plato threatens what is dear and intimate to them. They are little able to defend their experience, which had seemed unquestionable until questioned, and it is most resistant to cool analysis. Yet if a student can — and this is most difficult and unusual — draw back, get a critical distance on what he clings to, come to doubt the ultimate value of what he loves, he has taken the first and most difficult step toward the philosophic conversion. Indignation is the soul’s defense against the wound of doubt about its own; it reorders the cosmos to support the justice of its cause. It justifies putting Socrates to death. Recognizing indignation for what it is constitutes knowledge of the soul, and is thus an experience more philosophic than the study of mathematics. It is Plato’s teaching that music, by its nature, encompasses all that is today most resistant to philosophy. So it may well be that through the thicket of our greatest corruption runs the path to awareness of the oldest truths.”

“Roy [Orbison] and Joe Melson wrote ‘Running Scared,’ inspired by Maurice Ravel’s Bolero, after a pep talk by Fred Foster [Roy’s producer at Monument Records] . . . .”

Roy Jr., Wesley, and Alex Orbison, with Jeff Slate, The Authorized Roy Orbison, Centre Street (Hachette Book Group), New York – Nashville, 2017, page 82

neo: Good for you. I do. And until Bloom corrects that impression, I’m sticking with it.

But if “The Closing of the American Mind” is just a poetic cri de coeur, on par with “Howl,” fine.

But I’m not going to respect it as a serious political or philosophic statement.

I agree that Bloom certainly meant to critique the general tendencies of rock music. But I cannot conclude that he meant his critique to apply to every single rock musician.

Couldn’t find a thing from Bloom about Larkin. I would be curious about it, because I see Larkin’s work (despite his sometime-use of the f-word) as having been mainly traditional. I also see Larkin as having been something of an opinionated curmudgeon himself. I like much of his poetry, though.

I will do my best to leave “you” out of my comments.