In 1966, at an event protesting the Vietnam War, Anne Sexton read, in a quiet voice, “Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman,” a meditation on her daughter’s eleven-year-old body. As Adrienne Rich recalled it, Sexton’s poem stood out from the men’s “diatribes against McNamara, their napalm poems, their ego-poetry.” By evoking, indirectly, war’s victims, the poem reframed the question of what makes art political.
Right now, it’s hard for TV viewers not to see duplicates of civic turmoil everywhere, in satire and melodrama, in sitcoms and superhero fantasies. People joke that “Veep” is a documentary; maybe “The Americans” is, too. But Damon Lindelof ’s “The Leftovers,” in its third and final season on HBO, is a different sort of show of the moment: it reflects global anarchy, but soulfully,…
