From the issue dated March 14, 2003
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A Time for Poets to Raise Their VoicesBy JAY PARINIThe recent commotion over the White House symposium on "Poetry and the American
Going back to the original topic of the symposium, let me suggest that it's probably useless to think in terms of an "American voice." No two poets sound alike, nor has there often been much political solidarity among poets. Many of our major poets of the early 20th century -- Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound -- fall into the category of politically conservative, some even reactionary. Frost hated Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. For his part, Eliot declared himself a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion. Stevens was pretty much an apolitical aesthete, an insurance-company executive who lived the life of a bourgeois suburban gentleman. Pound was downright fascist, an anti-Semite who openly supported Benito Mussolini, his hero. So much for poetry as an invitation to progressive politics. Nevertheless, Laura Bush invited us to talk about Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes, three seminal poets. Whitman does, indeed, seem like the prototypic progressive voice in poetry: "I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions," he cried in "Calamus," a fierce cluster of poems. "But really I am neither for nor against institutions." He supported only one: "The institution of the dear love of comrades." In poem after poem, our national bard protested slavery and poverty. He had no interest in pretty poems that would entertain: "The words of true poems do not merely please," he wrote. He was a democrat with a small "d," a man who considered himself a representative of the people, and who took his own voice to be the voice of America -- rather a grand leap of faith on his part. Many of Whitman's poems are overtly political and deal with issues at hand, as Jerome Loving notes in his fine biography, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself, suggesting that Whitman "introduced politics into poetry in Leaves of Grass by invoking the concerns of middle America" -- jobs, confusion about slavery, spirituality (as opposed to mere religiosity), democracy. Whitman's poems often appeal directly, and passionately, to the political impulses of his readers, but they do so in ways that do not, a century and a half later, seem dated. Emily Dickinson, living in a repressive time for women, did not have Whitman's robust feeling of centrality. "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" she declared. Born into a world where Calvinism drew a veil over women of genius, she had to reformulate herself by creating a poetry of canny subversion, ruled by irony. "Tell all the Truth," she cautioned herself, "but tell it slant." The work of poets, in her view, is to "light but Lamps" and then "go out" themselves: In each age, poets kindle the lamp and then fade away, while the age, a "Lens," picks up the beams and spreads them around according to its shape and quality. To a degree, Dickinson acknowledged that each age may apply its defining lens to the same words and find other meanings. Langston Hughes was another of the voices that Mrs. Bush wished to contemplate. It so happens that few poets in our history have written with such an uncompromising political energy, such a sense of grievance. In "Dinner Guest: Me," Hughes wrote: "I know I am/The Negro Problem." His biting poem about the Ku Klux Klan ended: A klansman said, "Nigger,In another poem, "Warning," he wrote: Negroes,Hughes's indictment of racism in America was nothing less than ferocious. It would have been terribly difficult to discuss him, even in the White House, while somehow ignoring his political message, so integral to the work itself. The question of what rights poets have to speak up is complicated. I would simply argue that poets are people who have spent a lot of time thinking about the relationships between words and things; they have thought about language and its applications and directions. They often feel a sense of responsibility when it comes to speech, and troubled when it seems insufficient to the realities around them. In "Of Modern Poetry," Wallace Stevens, though he seems to have stayed out of the political arguments of his time in any explicit way, addressed the poet's mandate. The modern poem, he said, has "to be living." It has to "face the men of the time and to meet/The women of the time. It has to think about war/And it has to find what will suffice." To discover "what will suffice," poets have no choice but to listen and watch closely, making judgments that often have political ramifications. Whatever their party affiliations, poets have usually been sensitive to their own times, responsive to the cruelties, injustices, and absurdities that confront them. In "North American Time," a remarkable poem, Adrienne Rich put it like this: Try sitting at a typewriterIn other words, poets cannot simply choose to separate themselves from the life of their times. They are, to a degree, responsible for the language, if not the life, of their tribe; it has always been part of their job description to point to things wrong and right about the hu-man condition in its present manifestation. A poet's way of saying may have few listeners, but those who listen do so acutely, and the words of true poems cut deep and resonate down the decades. They become the bedrock language of each time and place, a form of mediated speech against which all other language must measure itself. While poetry often addresses political issues, it would nevertheless be wrong to suggest that all, or even most, important poems over the centuries have had anything overtly political about them. Poets write about desire, they mourn losses, and they celebrate the daily activities that make life somehow possible in a difficult world. And, yes, a lot of protest poetry -- yesterday and today and probably tomorrow -- must be considered silly and ineffectual. But a few deeply considered voices always arise in the tradition of the bard: poets who somehow manage to find words that marry political concerns with poetic practice. Edmund Spenser, the great English poet, was living in Ireland in the 16th century, part of the occupying force, and he noted that there were "amongst the Irishe a certen kind of people Called Bardes." He said their profession was "to sett fourthe the praises and dispraises of menne in their Poems and Rhymes." The English invasion of Ireland was extremely bloody, and those bardic poets formed part of the resistance, a crucial part; their words rang down the centuries, and their stance gave courage to many who, in later decades, would work for the liberation of Ireland. Especially in times of war -- times such aswe find ourselves in today -- poets have spoken up boldly. I think of E.E. Cummings's great poem, "i sing of Olaf glad and big," in which he lauds a conscientious objector "whose warmest heart recoiled at war." I also recall the antiwar stance of poets like Daniel Berrigan, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Lowell, who made a noble, public nuisance of themselves during the Vietnam War. In their lives, as well as in their poems, they challenged readers to sit up and take notice. There is a place where poetry and politics converge, but it's a zone of complexity and nuance. Poetry at its best is always a frank, pained, sometimes elated expression of reality. It discovers and contemplates injustice. It laments poverty: that of imagination as much as physical poverty. It asks readers to imagine what has happened, and -- perhaps more important -- to imagine what might follow. This is work that Americans cannot afford to shirk. "The United States is being believed into existence," Robert Frost once suggested. "It will be a long time before it is completed." I accepted the invitation to the White House symposium because I thought it would do some good to have poets raising the voices of Whitman, Dickinson, and Hughes -- and their own as well, even if in anger -- in this house of the people. That is the very essence of the democratic system. Some have, of course, suggested that doing so would not have been polite: Mrs. Bush had been hoping for an apolitical event. My rejoinder is that poets -- like all citizens of conscience -- have the right and even the duty to speak up in times of crisis. Those who refuse to take a stand will be scorned by historians, who will quite sensibly ask: "Why did you go along with this?" Jay Parini is a poet, novelist, and professor of English at Middlebury College. He is editor of The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry (Columbia University Press, 1995). http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 27, Page B20
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education