ABSTRACT
15Wilful ignorance is a powerful enablement – so I was taught by Harold Bloom, a most able agonist in the gladiatorial arena of poetic discernment and my first poetry teacher in an ordinary place in New Haven, Connecticut, some time in the last century. By the beginning of the current century, I found ample confirmation of that insight in the realpolitik of the world, a substantiation that corroborated for me the worldliness of literature as world literature and the transferability of critical comprehension into political awareness. The distance between wilful ignorance and belligerent ignorance, I have come to realise, can be scant and easily traversed. And whereas poets create worlds by an act of will, historically politicians and those for whom they rule define the world for convenience by bellicose acts of expediency directed through self-serving management of the intricate ratio between knowledge and ignorance, a process glibly encoded in public discourse as ‘spin’.
