"When the king puts the poet on the payroll, he cuts off the poet's tongue."
An Arab proverb, according to Pete Seeger in this interview.
How well we know it. Who now remembers a work by onetime Poet Laureate, Cecil Day-Lewis, praising a campaign to get workers to work extra, unpaid hours? Of course he was well paid for his product by the right-wing daily that hired him. C. Day-Lewis, former Communist Party member, who took the Queen's shilling (or pipe of port).
I wonder how many anthologies carry those verses by the great man.

Something else I learned from the interview - the air of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" is from an Irish lumberjack's song. Bearing in mind the fondness of the Irish for recycling old airs with new lyrics, I wonder if that tune is Irish in origin.

One reader, in a comment, has raised the idea of a Nobel Peace Prize for Comrade Pete. I wonder if he would be comfortable in the company of Kissinger, Begin, Saadat?