As I write this, two days have passed since Donald Trump was elected to a second term as President of the United States. This was shocking for many of us, including me. I could not understand how citizens of a democracy that–whatever its flaws–had withstood wars and economic upheavals, could elect a man who had tried to overthrow that democracy. But, it’s not the fault of history if we fail to understand it. History happens, and we’re left to grasp at potential explanations as best we can. Unfortunately, these scattershot thoughts are not likely to yield such an explanation. The election is the occasion of these words. They are not intended to resolve its questions.
My purpose is to consider the proposition that poetry can yield a kind of knowledge that offers insights into history and helps us to resist it. Aristotle thought that poetry is a higher form of expression or subject than history because it’s more general. He understood history as being limited to specific incidents, the facts of what happened. Poetry could explore what might happen, the sort of thing a certain sort of person would probably do. This all sounds about right, as far as it goes. Aristotle, though, wrote very little poetry. If he had written more, he might have understood better how the poet is the vehicle of the poem, how the poem—or language itself—speaks through the poet. Language is the wood, saw, nails, and concrete, the raw materials of poetry. However, language also determines what can be said: it both suggests the poem and limits the poem. The most obvious way to consider this is in relation to rhyme, meter, and the repetitions of formal poetry, but the free-verse or prose poet is no less inspired by language and no less constrained by it.
I suppose there are poets who sit down at a mahogany desk in the morning, sip exquisite coffee from a fine porcelain cup, and determine exactly what kind of poem they will write, how they will write it, and even what it will mean. I wish them well with their project, but the rest of us find ourselves with only the vaguest notion, if that, of where our poems might be headed. In fact, that’s one of the greatest attractions of poetry. It takes us places we didn’t expect to go. History is retrospective—although I imagine it must be common among emperors, kings, and dictators to want to write it in advance. The historian is responsible for our record of events and finds patterns and explanations in those records, but the historian’s predictions don’t seem more accurate than anyone else’s. Neither the historian nor the poet is particularly good at soothsaying.
The poet, though, does have some advantages. The poet does not have the burden of intellectually determining what has occurred and why. The poet’s job is to record what it feels like, to allow the experience to be embodied by language, and to collaborate with language to make such experience accessible to others. Moreover, the poet does not have to find patterns or causal connections. We’re creatures of contingency. The contemporary poet faces the same problems in writing a poem as poets did a thousand years ago, to give voice to experience, often difficult and painful experience. This commonality gives us some perspective. Auden is sometimes wrongly criticized for his claim in “Elegy for W.B. Yeats”:
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper; it flows south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
Of course, Auden is right. Poetry is “a mouth” for history, not one of its causal connections. This fact is responsible for one of poetry’s gifts to those who write it and to those who read it. Expressing what it feels like to be alive in a time of crisis requires the poet to be aware of standing within history but also of standing outside it.
Because poets write from the perspective of language, which has been around longer than we have, we have the reassurance that all the events of history are transient, however painful they are at the time. The poems that were written during those events are proof of a kind of survival. I don’t mean that their poets necessarily survived them, but language did. This does not go unnoticed by oppressors of various stripes. It may even be the source of their antipathy to poets, an antipathy that is otherwise difficult to explain. It’s the nature of autocracy to impose behavior on its subjects. The evidence of the autocracy’s power is how much it can control that behavior. The subjects must refrain from stating offending political views, must profess certain religious beliefs and deny others, and must accept the most obvious lies as true. I can think of two Central American countries where the rulers in one declared that everyday is Christmas and in the other, as a distraction from uncomfortable economic and political realities, that Christmas would occur in October this year. In such a world, the truth of human lives as they are experienced is of extraordinary value. It’s no wonder that over the centuries poets have frequently found themselves exiled or incarcerated.
It is possible that these are the last days of a democratic experiment began two hundred and forty-eight years ago. It is also possible that in a few years the citizens will want to return to that experiment. I don’t know if there is a convincing explanation for why or how we arrived at this moment, but I do know that it’s important for the people who will see us as part of their history to know what it felt like to be here. Our poems will present that perspective more deeply than any history, and I believe we’ll embrace uncertainty, as hard as that may be. The writing of poems, where we never know our destination until we get there, is good training, even a kind of faith.