I spend much of my week doing purposeful writing, usually legal writing with the goal of convincing someone of something that benefits a client. The poetry I write, however, does not have a purpose and should not have a purpose.
I understand that our democracy is endangered more than it has ever been, and I do not minimize the importance of politics in our lives right now. I also feel the outrage felt by so many people I admire. But, most of the poetry I read that is coming out of this moment does not embody the strength of imagination necessary to comprehend this experience and personalize it. The great public poets are often the most private. I think of Milosz writing during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising or Akhmatova during Stalin’s terror. These are poets who wrote out of enormous pain, without any certainty that what they wrote would be read or would make any difference. Their writing was, in Auden’s term, “a mouth.” If life and history place a poet in such a position and that poet can encompass those events in words, then we, the readers, are given a gift and a burden. The gift is the breadth of the poet’s imagination, to recreate that horror, and the burden is the responsibility it places on us to make the writer’s world, or at least the writer’s understanding of that world, part of our own.
Martin Buber pointed out that one of the characteristics of the great mystics was that they did not set out to become mystics. It happened to them. Similarly, no sane person would wish to experience what Milosz or Akhmatova experienced. If a poet wants to write the kind of poetry that results from bearing witness to suffering, it likely means that poet would not be capable of the necessary response.
I am not suggesting that any kind of poetry is off-limits to anyone or that no one should write poems about oppression unless they’re Eastern European. I am suggesting that poetry should serve only itself, not some noble cause, political theory, religious ideal, or social program. Poetry should be without that kind of purpose.
Good poetry creates a reality for its readers. If it persuades, it persuades us that the emotions and thoughts it contains are as real as our own lives. When I teach, I often quote Yeats’ sharp observation “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Our poems, to be poems, have to be aware of the conflicts we ourselves feel. If, instead, we are telling our readers what they should feel, if we are instructing them or trying to persuade them to sympathize with or take up a particular viewpoint, then we become propagandists, not poets.
When I argue that poetry should not have a purpose, that it should avoid didacticism, I am not advocating passivity in the face of oppression or injustice. I’m simply aware of how easy it is to betray poetry for a good cause and how hard it is to write a poem that is its own reason for existing. To write a poem that creates a reality is difficult, and often, the outcome is uncertain. Poets who embrace moral indignation without examining their own contradictions bypass both uncertainty and the hard work of making a poem real. That shortcut comes at the price of the poem itself. For sure, the poet who exhorts readers to action most often means well, just as the minister who wishes to save parishioners’ souls means well. However, meaning well is no guarantee of anything. The minister may be worshiping a god who doesn’t exist, and the impassioned poet may be writing poems that ultimately move their author, not the reader.
At this point, a scornful social or religious critic might reasonably ask me, “Can good poetry, then, only be written by villains?” While the history of literature is full of bad people who wrote great poems, my answer would still be “No.” Poems that seek to manipulate the reader’s feelings and thoughts may excite on first reading, but they will not continue to do so.
I can immediately think of two great poems written in English in the heat of brutal historical events that continue to move me: Yeats’ “Easter 1916” and Auden’s “September 1, 1939.” In both poems, the voice of the poet is scalpel-like, sharp and revealing. However, neither Yeats nor Auden places himself in a superior position to his readers. They do not tell their readers what to feel. They record what it is like to be alive during these events, for Yeats the Easter Rebellion and for Auden Hitler’s tanks rolling into Poland. Both poets explain their misgivings, their uncertainties. Yeats is left at the end only with the knowledge that “A terrible beauty is born,” and Auden with the hope that during this crisis he will “Show an affirming flame.” These poems affect us because they refuse a Manichean worldview. They are real, written by real human beings living through times of great violence.
It is important to note that we do not turn to these poets for answers. We turn to them so that we can live without answers. The reality their poems create is imperfect. They exist in an unredeemed world where things do not simply come right at the end. They exist, in Yeats’ phrase, “where motley is worn,” or in Auden’s “low dishonest decade.” But, it is by reason of this imperfection that we can join them in the universe of those poems. We recognize the bar where Auden is sitting on that September night. We are sitting there too. When Yeats acknowledges that “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart,” we sense the incomprehensible waste of violence, and we know he is speaking about someone he loves.
Just as the worlds where these poems exist are not perfect, the poets are also imperfect. Yeats accused Wilfred Owen of writing poems about war that were all “blood and sucked sugar stick,” and the Auden of “Spain” is adolescent compared to the poet who wrote “September 1, 1939.” Orwell wrote devastating criticism of Auden’s acceptance in that poem of “the necessary murder,” pointing out that the line could only have been written by someone who wasn’t present when the trigger was pulled, someone who hadn’t experienced the reality of murder. Perhaps though, Auden’s preaching in “Spain” and unconsidered, bad ideas in service of a good cause were necessary. Perhaps, he had to learn from his mistakes.
At any given time, none of us knows what will happen, and the poems of our time will presumably reflect the lack of certainty many of us feel. Just a few years ago, we believed our planet was endangered but was becoming a better place. Apartheid had ended in South Africa, the Berlin Wall had come down, a black man was elected President of the United States. The future wasn’t necessarily a utopia, but it was a work in progress, a work filled with greater equality and greater freedom. In just a short time, that belief has come to seem more naïve than the Children’s Crusade.
Over a hundred years ago, Thomas Hardy told us we were “getting to the end of dreaming.” He was right. Now, we have to figure out how to live in an epoch where the powerful are unconstrained by law or ethics, and we no longer think that progress is inevitable. Poetry cannot provide the answers we need, but it can help us survive this period. The quarrels with ourselves that are explored by poetry are not merely good subject matter or smart poetic strategy, they are who we are. Poems that look to explore those quarrels do not aspire to persuade us of anything. They are not propaganda for a better world or condemnation of evil men. Because they are without purpose, we can believe them.