I don’t think anyone places George Orwell in the front rank of literary artists. His great contribution to Western Civ. was memorably to clarify for us the connection between language and politics.

Orwell was, though, a well-read man of deep literary sensibilites who loved language, and he did his best as a writer. He even wrote some poetry, though this is not widely known. His poems aren’t great, but they’re not bad, either — better than mine, for sure.

Here is one I particularly like, and have added to my readings (and to my RSS feed, if you subscribe). It’s melancholy — somewhere the far side of melancholy, in fact — but hey, for us conservatives, these are melancholy days.