“The Message as Art,” a short essay, is likely the written version of a lecture that John William Corrington delivered to the South-Central Modern Language Association in 1971. The title of that talk was “The Poetry of Rock & Roll.”

The “message” in art to which Corrington refers involves politics, or the role of “social consciousness” in works of poetry and fiction. Corrington suggests that, rather than generalize about the importation of politics to literature, one should examine each work on a case-by-case basis to determine whether it is art with a social theme or merely “a harangue disguised as art.”

Corrington is concerned with the distinction between art and propaganda; the latter, he suggests, is marked by cliché and the sort of troping that entails no clear political referent (i.e., no nameable, observable social examples) in the actual world. For this reason Corrington criticizes art that employs such general types as “Big Business, the German Army, the Atomic Bomb, Big Labor, Hollywood, Mom, jingoistic patriotism, etc.”

“The Message as Art” has been printed in my recent edition of Corrington’s work, which is available for purchase by clicking on the image below: