Yankee Alighieri

Love Drink Fight Hate Yankee Alighieri

It all begins with a severe case of "Occidentophilia". I mean, Mr. Alighieri's got it bad ... and that's good actually. Then you take the best of the West -- to wit, English-speaking civilization, as George Orwell was fond of saying -- and you proceed to sing its praises. Indeed, most befittingly, you commandeer the great Anglo-American Songbook in order to do so. And what do you have? Well, you have a kind of "Neo-Con Song". You have "Love Drink Fight Hate: Four Cantos at Serenissimo's Behest". Serenissimo: Italian for "His Most Serene Highness", it is Mr. Alighieri's nickname for none other than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, author of (inter alia!) the delightful "From How Many Elements". The latter acts as a template of sorts, but it is more properly Goethe the "aristos" that most inspires our Yankee -- along with the great battalion of masters of the Western Canon that possess this book. For Goethe was serene precisely because he was at one with the inexorable truth of the human condition: that all nations and civilizations, like the individuals who comprise them, are crucibles of light and darkness, love and hate, prudence and daring, avarice and generosity, war and peace -- "swing and torch". To try to extirpate but one -- say "hate" by way of special tribunals -- is utter folly. Inexorably truer -- nay, truest -- is the reality that some individuals and cultures are "lighter" than others; or, obversely, "darker"; and that the twain ever shall meet sooner or later ... and on the battlefield. Serenity, as well as courage, surrounds those who so discern and act accordingly. The muses indulge those who so compose and sound the shofar. Ultimately, then, with "Love Drink Fight Hate", we have poetry in its purest form; what the ancients might have called "poetica ancillla bellum" -- poetry as the handmaiden of war. ... Need I say more? Yankee Alighieri is the Seal of the Poets. He was last spotted buying a Borsalino on the Isle of Capri. His whereabouts -- to say nothing of his biography -- remain decidedly incognito.