Tom & Alissa

The Poetry Society of America is going through some rough times, stemming from an award given to a poet who has previously made comments that some of the Poetry Society’s board members found racially-charged.

Other board members said they felt that such comments were not characteristic of Mr. Hollander’s views or had been misinterpreted. Mr. Louis-Dreyfus said that even if the comments were representative, they were irrelevant criteria for judging the Frost Medal, just as he would argue that Ezra Pound’s anti-Semitism should not detract from the literary appreciation of his work.

In some ways the questions about Mr. Hollander’s remarks reflect a broader debate over whether the evaluation of artistic merit should be affected by the sometimes unsavory opinions or actions of the artist. Last year, for example, Germany was stunned when Günter Grass, the Nobel Prize winner, confessed that he had joined the Waffen SS, the military branch of the Nazis, when he was 17. At the time, some people argued that he should renounce his Nobel.

I go back and forth on this very issue. On the one hand, rewarding people of questionable morals seems morally repugnant; on the other hand, everyone has their own skeletons in the closet, and I really tend to think that art (and all work) should be judged on its own merits and not the lifestyle of its maker.

What do you think?