But I know a dozen teenagers with better politics than Auden
Has Nealon hit upon a simple, linear way to describe the politics of canonical poets? We can simply judge how many teenagers within the range of acquaintance of, say, a college professor would have better politics than Poet X, or Poet Y, or Poet Z.
W. H. Auden would have a Nealon Woke Teenager Index, or NWTI, of 12. Robert Lowell would probably not do as well, perhaps in the forties or fifties--good on Vietnam, but that homophobic stanza in "Skunk Hour" is going to hurt him.
Elizabeth Bishop might not do even as well as Lowell, given her somewhat scoffing attitude about the women's movement and her support for the 1960s military coup in Brazil. The minstrelsy/blackface imagery in Dream Songs could put John Berryman in the low one-hundreds.
Ezra Pound or W. B. Yeats would be in the high three figures, perhaps, eight hundred, nine hundred. We might have to establish an upper limit for those cases in which the poet has worse politics than any teenager one is likely to meet in the 2020s, like Pound or Yeats. Or Alexander Pope: "Whatever is, is right"? Okay, boomer.
Speaking of Pope, going deeper into the past could raise some interesting discussions. Shelley's revolutionary principles could get him down to eight or nine, even, lower than Auden, but his gender politics could ratchet him up to the thirties or forties. Charlotte Brontë's gender politics could bring her down to the teens, but Shirley's take on organized labor might put her in the nineties. Jane Austen might demonstrate a similar mobility. William Blake may be the only zero in the canon.
Perhaps we need not even confine ourselves to literary figures. How many teenagers does one know with better politics than Napoleon? Or Alexander Hamilton? What would Lincoln's NWTI be?
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