[Just read Kelley's re-post from her list. Consider what follows something like the art history version.]
First of all the way Sartre constructs the idea is confused and not very well put together. It gives too brief an historical perspective and constricts the idea of a writer or poet. He must have been thinking about the uses of poetry in the middle of WWII. If you ask what is the purpose of a poet in the middle of an mass scaled industrial war, you're going to get a very limited answer.
The underlying question is what is the use of art, or the arts in a bourgeois society and what was the change of position of the artists or the people who made the public and institutional culture between the 18th and 19th c? In order to understand that, you have figure out what was the difference between a feudal and a bourgeois society.
So, start with feudalism. The aristocracy or nobility arose as a class from its historical evolution out the late Roman Empire as the empire's collapsed imperium dissolved into the latifundia, a disjointed class of land holders.
The functional utility of the latifundia was to organize a self-contained and self-sustaining economic community based on indentured peasants and tradesmen under a patrician patriarch. This patriarch would have originally been from one of the privileged Roman families, a officer in the imperial army, or a conquered patriarch who had been latinized by the Romans.
Most of Medieval Europe was composed of these communities. The estates, their villages, fields, orchards, and small townships were the agricultural base of Europe until the French Revolution and the subsequent industrial revolution dissolved them, and they were probably not really completely gone until the wars and revolutions in the 20c. Obviously most of the rest of the world's agricultural base was constructed along similar systems, and probably still is.
So, to the point. Artisans, musicians, tradesmen who lived in the townships were perhaps not technically indentured, but they were vassals to the estate and produced the medieval arts and culture. For example these are the people who build the cathedrals, sang the madrigals, performed in the comeda dell'arte, and produced the fancy versions of the religious and secular festivals and fairs. One applied to leave the territory of the estate and certain classes of craftsmen and artisans were independent contractors who moved from town to town, from project to project, just as there were semi-free roaming musicians, singers, and theater companies.
The renaissance more or less amounted to the process of forming independent city states as rival economic and political power bases to the surrounding estates, land owners, and principalities. Under this urban development, then the indentured system to estates and service to clergy and church was replaced with the guild system of merchants, trades, and contractors. The heads of the merchant guilds formed the city counsels or town fathers. These counsels were responsible for the general construction, development and maintenance of the city. Under this system, then art and architectural projects were city projects initiated and managed by the guilds. Most of the famous renaissance artists were essentially building or trade contractors, still linked to their shops and under the authority of their city's guilds. Michaelangelo was technically a stone mason, Donatello a goldsmith, as was Durer. Their patrons were mostly the capital based merchant class, for example the Medici, Michangelo's local patrons were bankers in Florence. The hierarchy of the Church also maintained a patronage system and commissioned buildings, decorations, and so forth, sometimes through the city guild systems and for less prosperous regions simply through their own clerical system contracting directly with the local tradesmens and shops. In general this system of guilds also produced the music and theater. Technically, poetry would have been something of a refinement either from a music or theater guild.
So, Sartre is being misleading or over simplifying in saying, ``The professional writer whatever his origin...had direct relations with the aristocracy, bypassing the bourgeois. Given a pension by the nobility, or flogged on its orders, he was under its immediate dependence...'' Writers per se, as perhaps opposed to poets, would have been part of a loosely defined class of quasi bureaucratic clerks, translators, notoraries, scribes, copy readers attached to just about any office, say from the church, the aristocracy, or the royal courts through the academy system. These offices of course included the high bourgeoisie of merchants and city officials.
What Sartre is trying to get at is the revolt of a declassed bourgeois against itself, and the seminal core of that revolt was of course the post-revolutionary Romantics and later in the century the Realists, which included Baudelaire and Courbet the painter in the 1850s. Writers were just one of a whole group that included all the arts.
During the 19c secular and civic authority over the arts was managed through the academy system, a hierarchy with students at the bottom then professors or masters, local administrators, on upward to the national academy members. Each of the cities and towns in the provinces had their regional arts counsel and made their requests for works and public productions through the central state bureaucracy which was also the national education system, ending at the top of the hierarchy in the national academies. So everything from historical paintings in local city halls which were produced for the national salons and distributed afterward, to their music concerts, and theater productions were produced under the auspices of the appropriate state academies for art, theater, ballet, opera, music.
Sartre as a professor of philosophy, was part of this national system and knew his own position as a writer was hardly any different from that of the academicians of the 19c. So Baudelaire was essentially both his idol and nemesis of revolt, in a typically Sartrian neurotic ambivalence.
What sets Baudelaire apart, along with some of his contemporaries was their revolt against this nationalized system of the arts, and their declared independence from it. Their motives were a little dubious since they were its rejects anyway. In any event, they were its primary critics, and their only means of earning a living outside of this system was through hand to mouth work for newspapers, magazines, and independent productions under the sponsorship of some interested well off individual patron. There were numerous scams such as making themselves charming to some rich woman who amused herself by holding private salons on a routine schedule. For example Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, George Sand and others all routinely made the rounds of these Paris salons as did many of the ex-patriot american painters Whistler, Homer, and Sargent. Independent artists and writer collectives formed and collapsed with predictable regularity along with their seedy publications and fly by night galleries. Everyone had a manifesto. They populated the same run down rented halls and meeting rooms as the early worker unions and political malcontents like Marx. So, in a sense the writers and painters were just as close to the industrial proletariat as their political and union leadership.
In a hundred and fifty years, the position of writers and painters, and political malcontents has hardly changed a bit. So, I am not sure what Sartre was griping about. Hell, he had his state teaching job. So what's all this noise about parasites? In a capitalist society there are only predators, prey and parasites, so what? If you carry this idea far enough, you can arrive at the neoliberal agenda which seems to be to make the state a parasite to capital.
When you asked what would be the purpose of poetry today, the answer is nothing has changed a bit. It serves the same purposes as always. It constructs and expresses the style, the sensibility, the imagery, and the sounds, through language of the experience of living. What else? And through its dissemination, in reproduction and recitation poetry re-creates those styles, sensibilities and images that constitute a living language that reflects exactly the same thing. All the arts do something similar in different mediums and through differing modes. When you collect these expressions together and reproduce them either in your mind, or become an audience for some production of them, then you look into the state of society at the intersection of these expressions, as if you were looking at a tableau, a magic theater, a film.
Poetry happens to be an especially reduced form, like a solo instrument, or an ink wash drawing, very close to its utilitarian or functional root as language, as voice, as gesture.
As for proletariat poetry, there is rap, before rap was anything more than a tape sold on a bus for five bucks by say Too Short, waay too short for five bucks, ha, ha. And there is always blues, in the modes before big bands and high styled productions, which amazingly still lives on--at least for us old foggies.
As for classical(?) proletarian writers there is a fairly long list that depends on the country, the language, the period--and especially your own definition of proletariat. Baudelaire and Zola are not an all together bad start along with the early journals, essays, and short stories of Camus. There are Silone and Pasolini. In the US the classic examples were all journalists at one point or another: Sam Clemens, Walt Whitman, and Stephan Crane. Then there are the Jewish immigrant writers and the Black writers from the thirties on until maybe the fifties, say Wright to Baldwin. There are the SF beats poets and the NYC artists, Kline, Pollock, and David Smith. Some were outright communists, some were socialists, some where not. These were US heirs to the once upon a time disaffect bourgeois, the bohemians, the romantics of the 19c.
If you want to keep a certain purity of definition of proletariat then you have to go looking for the arts, and they are there on walls, in designs and home projects, in auto shops, in speech, in stories, in children's games and songs, in small clubs and bars, in cooking and family recipes and legends. Under this definition then the arts remain embedded close to their roots in the utilities of living as the expression of that life.
Then at the other end of the spectrum, say at the highest levels of bourgeois capitalism, the entire envelop of mass media is one long glorious art production that celebrates the grand Imperium and creates its magical ideology, giving it a living presence. At this level writers, poets, visual artists, musicians, orchestras, film, video crews and their minions along with their infrastructure of manufacture, production, distribution and communication systems are brought together by the thousands to create the whole illusion of the world we imagine we inhabit. This is the so-called entertainment industry that we are trying so disparately to force down the throats of the world's worshiping or hostile masses.
So, it is important to realize that what is intended by the name, writer as in the disaffected bourgeois, the part-time teacher, and part-time media hack, is only one possibility. Sartre has constricted the idea of a writer to this realm, but it is hardly exhaustive. And, obviously I don't think it is very illuminating either.
Okay, enough. The original version of this take, it comes from Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art.
Chuck Grimes