When I dropped out of college, I moved to New York to write socially relevant poetry as I supported myself working with computers. Computers took up more and more of my time as the poetry diminished. Now, over twenty-five years later, my writing comes back to gain new focus for me.

In college, I was told that there are three books you must read if you wish to be a serious writer. Ezra Pound’s The ABC of Reading. T.S. Elliot’s The Sacred Wood and Denise Levertov’s Light Up the Cave. They still sit on the floor next to me and I turn to them from time to time.

The other day, I thumbed through The Sacred Wood and found this passage: “In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to ‘the tradition’ or to ‘a tradition’; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is ‘traditional’ or even ‘too traditional.’ Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure.”

With this in mind, I stumbled across the opening to the Denise Levertov’s chapter, “On the Edge of Darkness: What is Political Poetry?”

“A good deal of poetry one can call political in some way has appeared in this country and elsewhere in recent years. When I asked a young poet who has written some such poems what he would want to hear about in a lecture on poetry and politics, he replied that he’d like some assurance that there was a tradition for political poems, the poetry of social criticism, and that it was not a rootless phenomenon.”

As I read Levertov’s words, I couldn’t help but replace the references to poets and poetry to bloggers and blogs. Is there a tradition upon which political bloggers can build upon?

People often suggest that tradition for political bloggers in pamphleteers. Yet I wonder how many political bloggers think of their writing as part of a literary tradition and have read any of the writing of those that came before them in the tradition.

Can we learn from writers that came before us, either greats like Pound, Elliot and Levertov, great pamphleteers, or other writers that could help us as bloggers?