Conservatives and Culture

In a recent talk at the American Enterprise Institute, Dana Gioia remarked that “in the past half century, American conservatism has retreated from artistic culture.” He traces that retreat and notes:

By the year 2000, rightly or wrongly, conservatives became associated with defunding, censorship, restriction, and complaint. The right seemed to be banning novels instead of writing them. It banned artwork rather than creating new visions of beauty that spoke more potently. For the past fifty years, which is to say, my entire adult life, conservatism has held only a marginal position in American arts and humanities.

That “marginal position” continues today, but things are slowly beginning to change. Last year, First Things founded an annual poetry prize for poems that show a high view of form. The poet and novelist Amit Majmudar, whom we have published for nearly twenty years, was our inaugural outside judge. Josiah Cox won first place for his poem “Two Owls”—a “sonically and symbolically” rich poem, Majmudar remarked, that investigates both “predatory sight and visionary insight” in the figure of owls at night. Ryan Wilson won second place for his personal and metaphysical sonnet “Gather Ye.” This year, Gioia himself will serve as judge. (Submissions are open until June 30.)

While not a conservative initiative per se, the new Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at St. Thomas University in Houston is a program that encourages students to draw from the riches of the Western literary tradition to create works marked by nuance and excellence. Its annual summer literary series has welcomed distinguished writers and critics such as Ron Hansen, Adam Kirsch, Randy Boyagoda, Kevin Hart, Sarah Cortez, and Jessica Hooten Wilson to campus.  

This year the Intercollegiate Studies Institute founded the Linda L. Bean Prize for Advancing American Art & Culture. It gave the inaugural award to the artist Jamie Wyeth. It is the only overtly conservative prize I am aware of that has honored a painter in the past fifty years. 

Passage Publishing, which was created in 2022 “as an alternative to the increasingly closed-minded worldview of modern mainstream publishing,” has run two editions of its Passage Prize, which collects winning entries in art, short fiction, and poetry. It focuses on new work that takes risks—something that is in short supply today—but the press also publishes older work that helps “tell a more complete story of our past.”

In book publishing, a venture like Wiseblood Books, which was founded in 2013, is encouraging. It focuses exclusively on critical and creative work, most of it original, and has published writers such as Rhina P. Espaillat, Glenn Arbery, Alfred Nicol, Lee Oser, and James Matthew Wilson. While not a conservative press, Slant Books publishes much excellent writing, which includes several books by conservative authors. Paraclete Press, which has been around since the early 1980s, has recently shown a renewed commitment to publishing original poetry and has published two prize-winning anthologies since 2022. 

While there is no conservative Paris Review—which is to say, the sort of publication that focuses exclusively on critical and creative work and has the clout to make reputations—several smaller periodicals such as Dappled Things, Able Muse, Literary Matters, and New Verse Review regularly feature excellent work. 

There are no doubt other ventures that provide reason to be encouraged—some local, some national—but the examples above show that the situation today is substantially different from the situation ten years ago. A real shift is happening. Yet, more work remains to be done.

Drawing, perhaps, from Michael Oakeshott, Gioia concludes that conservatives need “to engage with culture as a conversation, not as an argument. We need to define ourselves with strategies, not as a war, but as a vast reengagement, recreation, and reconciliation.” 

He’s right. Conservatives have a real opportunity to engage with culture again after fifty years of neglect in part because the left has abandoned it. Serious ideas and great writers, which used to be discussed at length in our most prestigious literary reviews, have either been ignored entirely or treated only in terms of their political value. 

But conservatives need to be careful to avoid the same mistake. The reason to write (or publish) a poem or novel is not to shape readers’ political sensibilities, though this can happen. The reason, quite simply, is that making art is a distinctly human thing to do. And if that art is any good, which is to say, pleasing and true, it will do the work it is meant to do—recall us to ourselves—regardless of passing political battles.

Submit your poetry for the second First Things annual poetry prize here.