Where Are Today's Warrior-Poets?

King David was a king, a warrior-general, and a poet-psalmist. Marcus Aurelius was an Emperor and a literary stylist and thinker of a poetic calibre.

Yet today, most recognized poets and novelists are professional writers. They are great observers, but rarely rule, build, or run organizations. They are flaneurs, wanderers, whose affected outsider status allows them to see and say what insiders can’t. Except they aren’t quite outsiders, because most work as university professors.

Meanwhile, most people who work in government, business, finance, or tech, lack literary/philosophical ambition and/or skill. The only exception that comes to mind is Nassim Taleb—but he writes non-fiction. Show me a great poet today who is also, for example, an enterprise executive or a successful start-up founder?

Why?

Is it just because of division of labor? A person can’t be excellent in two areas? Or is there a deeper trade-off between the calling of the writer-thinker (contemplative) and the calling of the doer-maker (pragmatist)? Or is it simply sociological? Different subcultures value different things? Or is it about incentives and what it takes to succeed psychologically in a given domain? Or perhaps it’s that society itself guides people into “types,” selling them the limited belief that they have to pick an archetype and stick to it?

One counter-argument to my question is that there are great poets and novelists who are also great founders and leaders, but we won’t know about them until after they’re dead—since their focus is on doing, not on publishing.

But if you buy my question and think it’s tragic that we’ve quarantined the literary talent from the practical talent where would you begin creating a society in which we could again have them combined?

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