No One Asked the Poets

AS THE BOMBS begin to drop, as we begin, as a society, to speak in the vernacular of SCUD and F-15 and our airwaves are suddenly, more than ever, monopolized by generals and Pentagon spokesmen, by understandably trembling journalists and the satellite-dished, horrific images of mothers placing gas masks on their small children, it may, now more than ever, be a good time to ponder the role--or, rather, the nonrole--of poets and poetry in our lives, of the men and women in this country who are dismissed from the daily hurly-burly of significance with the rather glib, dismissive term: "humanists."

William Butler Yeats, the great Irish poet and statesman, who at least had the luxury of being asked, had one possible response to the poet/humanist's role in urgent matters of war and peace when he wrote that:

I think it better that in times like these

A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth

We have no gift to set a statesman right;

He has enough of meddling who can please

A young girl in the indolence of her youth

Or an old man upon a winter's night

("On Being Asked For a War Poem")

This--although it was not, in fact, an attitude Yeats was entirely comfortable with, as I will show later--is, for the most part, the way our society likes its poets and humanists--preoccupied, in a state of near anaesthetized artistic bliss, with "pleasing young girles and old men," as far removed from the eyes (and, more dangerously, the ears) of the average citizen as humanly possible. Licensed, in other words, and ignored.

It is hard, no doubt, to imagine Peter Jennings--after a military briefing from General Schwarzkopf in Saudi Arabia and a Pentagon briefing by Secretary Cheney in Washington--switching to a "spiritual" briefing, not by Billy Graham but by some American poet or writer (aside from Tom Clancy) in Cambridge or New York or Omaha or San Francisco. It is hard not to imagine it because whereas, as the late poet Robert Lowell said (not so long ago, when poets were at least invited to the White House), "Every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public celebration without making subtle public commitments," serious poets and writers in this country enjoy virtually no public celebration--ergo, don't need to worry their sweet little heads over anything more important than young girls and old men.

BUT THE FACT IS that we do worry our little heads over this War--over the thousands and millions of innocent men, women and children, Christians, Moslems and Jews, whose lives are already jeopardized in the penumbral wake of our (according to General Schwarzkopf's superbly edited videos) immaculately "neat" and efficient technological weapons, our unflinching resolve to bring the evil dictator Hussein (whom we and our "coalition" have, for the most part, armed) to his knees. And, in this regard, it may be worth quoting from a letter written by Lowell to another very popular American President, Franklin Roosevelt, waging an even more popular and clearly justified war, in September of 1943. In that letter, refusing to accept the "opportunity" of serving in the U.S. Armed Forces (after having twice unsuccessfully volunteered earlier in the War), Lowell wrote:

Americans cannot plead ignorance of the lasting consequences of a war carried through to unconditional surrender--our Southern states, three-quarters of a century after their terrible battering down and occupation, are still far from having recovered even their material prosperity. (italics mine)

And now, once again, confronting an eerily similar (though clearly not identical) situation--another "war until surrender" against a clearly malevolent and irrational dictator--it might not be so bad a time to listen to our poets and humanists who can at least hear, as could William Blake, "the mind-forg'd manacles":

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infant's cry of fear

In every voice, in every ban ("London")

or see, as did the after-all-not-unpolitical Yeats, that:

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.

O when may it suffice?

That is Heaven's part, our part

To murmur name upon name,

As a mother names her child...

MacDonagn and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.   ("Easter 1916")

But our society, of course, never listens, never wants to hear from its poets, choosing to get its "news" from the Rathers, Brokaws, Jenningses and Lehrers of the world--knowing, I suppose, as William Carlos Williams knew, that:

It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there...

Men are, at this very moment, dying for that lack, dying in a highly sophisticated, technological war which, after the already-dimming flush of first success, we have no idea when, or how, will end. And, in closing, it may be worth noting that the only two governments in recent memory that might, indeed, have asked their poets for a war poem at such a time--namely, Salvadore Allende's Chile and Daniel Ortega's Nicaragua--were brought down by the government that is now, with the consent of Congress, asking men, women and children to die in the Persian Gulf.

Michael Blumenthal is the director of Harvard's creative writing program.