This assumption that the blue collar crowd is not supposed to

“This assumption that the blue collar crowd is not supposed to read it, or a farmer in his overalls is not to read poetry, seems to be dangerous if not tragic.” So declares Joseph Brodsky, a man who bore exile, prison, and the scorn of authority, yet clung to words as the truest form of freedom. In this saying, he strikes at the chains that culture forges, the false walls between classes and the arts. He reminds us that poetry belongs to all, not to the few, and that to deny it to the worker or the farmer is to deny them a share in the inheritance of the human spirit.

The meaning of this truth is sharp: when society assumes that only the educated elite may partake in poetry, it steals from the people their birthright. Poetry is not the luxury of scholars but the marrow of human expression, born in every land and tongue. To claim that the blue collar laborer has no place in its beauty is to impoverish the nation’s soul. Brodsky calls it “dangerous if not tragic,” for a people cut off from poetry are cut off from the higher vision of their own dignity.

The origin of Brodsky’s conviction lies in his own life. Raised in Leningrad, he left school at fifteen and worked in factories, on ships, and as a laborer before becoming a poet. He himself was once the “blue collar crowd,” dismissed by authorities as unfit for literature. Yet his verses bloomed from that soil, and they later won him the Nobel Prize. Thus, he knew from experience that genius can rise from the overalls of the worker as well as from the robes of the professor. To bar poetry from the common people was, in his eyes, a form of tyranny.

History also bears witness to this. Consider Robert Burns, the farmer-poet of Scotland, who plowed fields by day and wrote verses by candlelight at night. His poems, born of sweat and soil, became the song of a nation. He proved that poetry was not confined to courts and academies, but lived also in the barn, the tavern, the furrowed field. To think otherwise, as Brodsky warns, is not only false but tragic, for it would silence the very voices that give poetry its fullest breadth.

The lesson here is luminous: poetry must be democratized, not hoarded. If the farmer or the laborer is told that poetry is not for them, they are robbed of a vital way to understand their own struggles and joys. And society itself is robbed of the poetry they might write, the fresh language that comes not from ivory towers but from the raw encounter with life. For the strongest poetry often comes from those who live closest to hunger, to toil, to earth itself.

Practically, this calls us to break the false walls. Share poetry not only in classrooms, but in workshops, in union halls, in community centers, in barns and kitchens. Give children of every background access to verse, so they know that their voices matter and their stories can be sung. Do not let poetry be painted as elite; let it be seen as bread for all. Just as a farmer tills the soil for food, so must society till the soil of imagination for nourishment of the spirit.

Thus the teaching endures: it is a dangerous tragedy to believe that poetry belongs only to a few. It belongs to the worker and the farmer as much as to the scholar and the king. For poetry is the song of the human spirit, and the human spirit knows no class. Brodsky’s warning is not only against cultural arrogance but against the slow starvation of the soul. Let poetry, then, flow like water, reaching every hand, every voice, every life.