The Lyric Poetry of the Authoritarian Personality: Reading "America First!"

Abstract Right-wing authoritarians in America today know that they need poetry for cultural legitimation but cannot seem to produce anything contemporary that would perform that function in intellectual life. Into this breach step Milo Yiannopoulos and Michele Malkin, with their “America First!” reading list, which includes, among other things, a fair bit of poetry. This article reads the poetry selection of the list in the context of its other recommendations, before turning to the sentimental nativist and neomedievalist Romanticism that emerges from this logic. A glance at the poetry of neo-Nazi hate website Stormfront indicates that the demotic and insular tenor demanded by the authoritarian personality today is difficult to reconcile with any plausible concept of intellectual life. The poetic efforts of less explicitly fascist poetry magazines, such as Atop the Cliffs and Rifts in Stone, confirm this by struggling to break free from the anti-intellectual Romanticism demanded by the cultural logic of right-wing authoritarianism today. Rather than recalling the line from Schlageter about culture, though, the essay concludes by remembering that authoritarianism’s relationship to high-powered assault weapons is anything but metaphorical, and that neo-Nazi verse is the lyric poetry of mass murder.