ARTIST OR BEGGAR - post from SOTA12 liveblogger Daniel B Yates

In Wordsworth’s poetry the figure of the beggar became a romantic handle for social critique.  So, in the spirit of the gamification of everyday life, let’s play a game with Wordsworth’s poetry: it’s called artist or beggar.

But deem not this Man useless.—Statesmen! ye
Who are so restless in your wisdom, ye
Who have a broom still ready in your hands
To rid the world of nuisances; ye proud,
Heart-swoln, while in your pride ye contemplate
Your talents, power, or wisdom, deem him not
A burden of the earth!

That’s an artist, well done if you got it right.

Before me begging did she stand,
Pouring out sorrows like a sea;
Grief after grief:—on English Land
Such woes I knew could never be;

That’s also an artist, I think it might be PJ Harvey, congratulations, bing bing, garp garp, level-up-klaxon -- it continues:

And yet a boon I gave her; for the Creature
Was beautiful to see; a Weed of glorious feature!

To call this woman a weed, however glorious, is as one scholar suggests to call her “fundamentally unproductive and superfluous, an unwanted albeit decorative plant”.  We could well be talking of artists here. Were such a thing around, Wordsworth would no doubt have relied on Somerset council for treatment of his pleurisy and his sister Dorothy’s physical and mental illness.  He may also have relied upon it for his art.  Last year Somerset council announced a hundred percent spending cut to its arts budget as a result of fiscal austerity measures imposed by the government in Westminster.  These cuts are not only ‘savage’ but barbarous, and as the major parties coalesce over a line of inevitability, how do  we continue to make the case for arts funding under a prevailing wind which would make beggars of us all?

Image shared on flickr via a cc license by fabbio