An Argument for Politics in Poetry

AN ARGUMENT FOR POLITICS IN POETRY
  by Dale Jacobson

I’ve listened to the debate on politics in poetry for nearly forty years, but for all the variations of argument, it seems to reduce to two basic issues, the complaint that political dogma or didactic intent (assumed always to be bad for esthetics) spoils the emotional power of poetry, and the notion that poetry in general is incapable of causing change, therefore political poetry presumes a purpose that poetry cannot accomplish.  At least one of these arguments was articulated by Joseph Brodsky at a Writers Conference (University of North Dakota) when he advised, as I paraphrase, if you want to change the world you should drop the pen and pick up a machine gun.  The other was likely implied when he commented that political news interfered with his freedom to admire the dawn.  An obvious counterpoint is that no topic should be excluded from poetry, regardless of these claims.   Still, it seems to me that we might do more than simply insist that politics should be equally available to poetry like any other topic.   We should say more than merely observe that we don’t require poems about other topics to initiate  change in our lives (actually, we do).  We might do more than merely say political poetry expresses feeling like any other poem.  Let us not forget the argument a poem makes.  Intellect raises a poem to greater mastery when effectively married to emotion.

To my mind, the best of political poems as well as others are those that do in fact unite emotion and argument, as we find in love poems, in poems of spiritual investigation, or any number of topics.  Intellect is particularly important to a political poem, which has as its purpose social or historical analysis, critique, even instruction.  What, after all, makes a poem political if not its inherent objection to a social wrong, or on the other hand, its promotion of a social good?  The objection carries within it a critique, sometimes explicit, sometimes not.  And yet, it is often specifically  the intellectual argument that is seen as illegitimate to political poetry, the complaint being that it is ideological, didactic, or dogmatic, though obviously a great amount of literature is exempted from this rule.  No one, for example, seems to object to Rilke advising that “You must change your life.”  One could easily argue there is an intent of spiritual instruction in The Divine Comedy.  Are we allowed to change as individuals but not as society?

There is perhaps a reason for a different standard being applied to political poetry.  We do, or ought to, have different expectations of political poetry because the argument the poem makes does matter.  Political poems  should take us further into society.  They should tell us more fully where we are.  They should see further into alternatives.  In a word, they should do more than arouse feeling, and certainly more than individual romantic feeling, which seems to me the dominate emotion in American poetry today.

Even Matthew Arnold’s existential poem, “Dover Beach,” argues for more.  Political poems should arouse communal feeling, and we might hope, communal consciousness.  And while T.S. Eliot is not perceived as a great political poet, he often does this, though sometimes by showing us its absence.  When Eliot asks, “Shall I at least set my lands in order?”  we have more than an individual complaint, but an acknowledgment of a shattered communal consciousness, as expressed by the following line:  “London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down.”  Thomas McGrath, one of our major political poets, was right to point out a certain revolutionary quality in “The Waste Land,” which is also true of Arnold’s earlier poem.  There is an inherent intellectual argument in Eliot’s juxtaposed lines.  And while “The Waste Land” is not a political poem in the sense that it advocates a corrective social system, it does critique the current one, which Eliot sees as private– and bleak.  Eliot's poem would generally not be considered political, I think, but it does prove a point and define a social need.  Even though the poem imagines no alternative to the situation, it clarifies it.  We are left with “private” land while the “public” bridge is collapsing.  This contrast contains an intellectual argument, though it does not indicate how to alter the status quo.

In discussing the place of politics in poetry,  Auden’s famous line in his poem for Yeats is often invoked, “poetry makes nothing happen.”   The assumption is made that Auden is correct, at least as he is interpreted, and so we must agree that poetry does not create change.  As recently as spring of 2010 I read an article questioning if poetry generally, not only political poetry, had a purpose, other than to be a con-game, presumedly for the benefit of its author.  Such a cynical view would deprive poetry of any capability of initiating change, even on an individual level.

I would argue that Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” for example, did change things.  It defined a moment.  It pointed to our social bankruptcy.  It created response.  It helped prompt Hart Crane, for example, to write The Bridge, a different bridge than Eliot’s.

I also think the next line in Auden’s poem is important to not overlook:  “[poetry] survives in the valley of its making.”  We know that the word “poet” derives from Greek, meaning “maker.”  If poetry is fundamental “making” or, let’s say, creation, the seat of creation, how can it  be destroyed or, more important, ignored?  It becomes, for Auden, the only legitimate act that matters, because it is the heart of creation.  Its perpetual survival means all else must be measured against it.  So while poetry makes nothing happen for Auden, it is the measure of all that happens.  This is another way of saying, in my view, Blake’s line in Milton (Lucifer, the first Eye of God speaking to Milton): “The Imagination is not a State: it is human existence itself.”  Those who maintain that Auden dismissed poetry as unessential to the determination of human history simply have not understood this line.  An equivalent argument would be that human beings are unessential to history.

Poet John Haines makes the following comment about Auden’s line:

  It has been said, and it was Auden who said it, in his elegy
  on W.B. Yeats, that “poetry makes nothing happen.”  And a
  reasonable person would agree, though if we were to be honest
  about it we might find it worthwhile to define that “nothing” and
  make clearer that other key word “happen.”  It is true, for
  example, that Goya’s series of etchings, The Disasters of War,
  did not change the nature of warfare, nor did its terrible images
  diminish the cruelty in human nature.  On the other hand, the
  moral passion in that work, combined with its unclouded vision
  and skill of hand, did result in a memorable art.  And was that
  nothing?  And did nothing happen?

  If a single poem, or a single line of poetry, has become
  lodged in one individual’s memory, to be recalled and repeated
  at an appropriate moment, and has as a consequence changed
  or enlarged that individual’s understanding of existence, and has
  in some further way educated or intensified his appreciation of
  values– would that be nothing?  (32-33).

In John Haine’s analysis, we have two issues, immediate or consequential political change, on one hand, and change as enlarging of consciousness, this enlarging of awareness possibly even another way of recognizing Auden’s “survival” of poetry, “a way of happening,” which we should understand in contrast to how “the dogs of Europe bark” toward war and so on.   Why is this enlarging of consciousness not change?

Most discussion of politics in poetry seems to frame the question in terms of the first issue:  does poetry cause political change in the material world?  And yet, how can we separate consciousness from the material world, even if poets are not politicians who decide its daily (and often reckless) course?  Thomas McGrath distinguished between strategic and tactical poetry, the latter being an immediate political poem to a specific event or moment.  McGrath certainly must have considered that such poems carried the potential to create change, otherwise why write them, as he also certainly understood that they were not intended to last, unlike “strategic” poetry.  McGrath also thought of his long poem, Letter to an Imaginary Friend, as the expansion of consciousness, which he obviously saw as change.  As Haines suggests, the right line on the right occasion might well assert those values that originate, ultimately, as Auden, Blake, Shelley and others have either said or implied, in the creative process itself.   Again, let’s remember that Auden’s poem contrasts the survival of this creative “way” with the destructive power of war.

We cannot know if poetry’s influence on individuals necessarily translates into promoting collective action, which is the method for political change, but there is no reason it can’t either.  The (largely tactical, to use McGrath’s word) anti-war poetry of the sixties certainly made a contribution.

It should not be a controversial proposition that poetry is involved in passing on throughout the ages of humankind continued belief in the human enterprise.  Obviously, there is an aspect of this legacy that involves the imagination.  The use of imagination to engender a potential outcome in reality is a central purpose of myth (and again, we see Auden’s insistence upon poetry as making).  Since society is largely unconscious of itself, myth is a way of increasing consciousness, and potentially bringing into reality the fulfillment of social needs.  Poetry is the continuation of this ancient method and so functions as a measure of where we are and need to be.

And perhaps here we come to something like an answer to the value of “political” poetry (which is a categorization that is by necessity somewhat arbitrary).  Poetry, political or otherwise, is a continuation of the legacy of the imagination, that is, the creative act of being alive.  It allows us to see, and feel, differently, beyond the restrictions of current society.  Feeling differently, which holds an inherent buried argument, is change.  Obviously, the existing power structures do not want change.  Still, they cannot avoid it, largely because technology continues to alter the material world (recall the myth of Prometheus), which then reflexively, though not always positively, causes people to perceive differently and alter the relations between themselves.

Poetry, especially political poetry, measures the value of these changes against its primary purpose, which is to bring everything together, to inclusively expand consciousness, to comprehend.  This comprehension is change, in perception and feeling.   However, without the true masterworks of the past, this legacy would not be possible.  Hence, if there is a future for  humanity, it rests on the continuation of this legacy, the creation of new masterworks since history changes the material world and those material changes alter our relationship to each other.  We cannot skip or break this process.

Even bad poetry might have a role to play, though I sometimes wonder if more damage isn’t done by bad political poetry and art than any good that can be obtained by its existence.   Still, as Blake has Los say in Jerusalem:  “each according his Genius.”  I’ve never been fond of the notion, begun by Carolyn Forché, of “poetry of witness,” which seems too limited, if not too righteous, too detached, that is, a false choice for poetry.  I have no objection to “witnessing” per se, but it seems to me poetry cannot be an outside observer, rather, it must be a participant.  It must be part of the Dionysian dance.  The stance of witness seems too moralistic and remote.

More important than witnessing, I think, is the expression of "genius,” because genius is more than merely any single voice or poem.  It is the collective definition of who we are.  Genius allows us to see differently.  Of course, sorting out what is genius and what isn’t can be a problem because there is a cultural war, one side of which wants to maintain the status quo.   Still, I don’t know how genius cannot involve discovery, new connections, casting our glance forward at the same time we review the past, unlike a destruction-obsessed "angel of history" that Forché invokes rolling up the past in ruin while unable to see the needs of the future.

Political poems are as necessary as any others, and why would they not be?  A society that tries to deny political poetry is essentially trying to avoid confronting what it is and where it needs to go, and a poetry esthetic that wants to deny social criticism, as John Haines has said, denies poetry’s ethical voice.

I would suggest poetry’s ethical voice has its roots in imagination itself.   What else will make known who we are to ourselves except artistic communication, and how can art, including poetry, not be central in that endeavor?  Poetry may not touch great numbers of people in a given moment, but poetry is the continuation of all moments of consciousness and so its ultimate impact, translated in numerous ways into other arts and arguments, is incalculable throughout time.

The question of politics in poetry is not whether they belong, but is our poetry one of sufficient imagination to tell ourselves where we need to go?   Is an apolitical esthetic one that allows poetry to have the greatest imaginative response to our world?   Imagination is always pushing against “reality,” the limitations that seem to be absolute at any given moment in the material world as defined by history.  It is partially, anyway, this “pushing” that determines the political character of poetry.  We can debate whether feeling precedes argument, but at some point a cognitive process is aroused, an intellectual recognition, a disturbance of contrast is asserted, which promotes an argument, however basic or brief.  This argument says things should be different and it is from this argument that the critical apparatus of a political poem proceeds.

A powerful poem combines the intellect with emotional content to give the poem life.  Consider the argument of “The Second Coming.”  Social order falls apart and we awaken to our savagery (or at least the rough beast of ourselves awakens).  But the savagery was always there; we were “vexed to nightmare” by a rocking cradle (our infant stage?).  This beast awakens, but without the pretense of religion, to what its history has really been.  That nightmare sleep is over and a new order will be determined by how humanity confronts this ancient violence, stripped of its sleep and now consciously, nakedly, seeing itself for what it has created.  The poem doesn’t go further, but without this argument, we would not have the power of history expressed in the poem either.

I would suggest that the greater intensity of a poem develops from its intellectual argument, though its language invokes the poem’s emotional power.  The process is not one of which the poet is always conscious because it can be rapid, but pathos devoid of it is also devoid of complexities and power.  In this regard, let us give consideration to the argument a political poem makes, from which its feeling, if the poem is successful as language, flows.  And let us also acknowledge that poetry does in fact promote change, even if its route to accomplishing that change is not directly measurable.  History, after all, is not necessarily linear.



Haines, John.  Fables and Distances.  St. Paul:  Gray Wolf, 1996. Print.



Dale Jacobson

dalejacobson@earthlink.net