These are not easy days for anybody, but if you’re a poet, fiction writer, or essayist and you have the resources and leisure to write, you’re not doing too badly. Compared, that is, to the people who don’t have a place to live, don’t have enough to eat, or who are being hunted by police with masks over their faces. Is it any wonder that writers feel overwhelmed right now?
Sure, there are plenty of Substacks and political columns where writers who specialize in crises can remind their readers just how bad it is, and it is bad. I confess that I’m an avid reader of these specialists. But, I’m not one of them. It’s important that the decline and fall of the American empire and all the other world catastrophes be documented and documented well, but when my literary family (poets et al) takes on this job, we often only produce propaganda—and not very convincing propaganda at that.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not telling anybody that they can’t write whatever they are moved to write. I’ve written plenty of bad, well-meaning political poems, but I don’t want to add to that pile of electronic paper or to urge others to do so.
The most common political poem is one where the poet takes a side in a social issue or conflict and uses the poem to argue for that side, usually hoping to sway undecided readers to join the struggle. Poets often come to regret those poems. Their emotion engaging with the form of the poem encourages positions they haven’t thought through, so when they’re called out, they don’t have much to reply. Orwell’s attack on Auden for his poem “Spain” is an example. In that poem Auden contrasted the bourgeois past and the romantic utopian future with the brutal present, writing “To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death, / The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder.” Auden’s real-politik use of the phrase “the necessary murder” is what caught Orwell’s attention. He pointed out that Auden’s poem could only have been written by someone “to whom murder is at most a word” and who’d never been close to an actual murder and went on to describe that proximity: “the terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the postmortems, the blood, the smells.”
The most effective poems that might be termed “political” are those poems that are intensely personal. Poetry is a form of communication. Even if we focus on the construction, the construction creates a communication. The subject lyric poetry communicates is what it’s like to be the speaker in that poem, to experience what the speaker is experiencing. When we live through a crisis that we feel personally, those poems we write about our response, the inner conversation we’re having as it happens, is what will most affect others. It will not in all likelihood send readers out into the street to protest, but at an emotional level it will expose them to what someone else is feeling. Our experience of the crisis will be passed on to the reader. What happens after that is beyond our control, and the greater our attempt to govern that response, the less effective the poem.
Here, I imagine a reader responding, “But what about prophecy?” It’s true that there is an ancient tradition of prophet-poets who inspire their communities to do the right thing, and anyone would be foolish not to honor that tradition. Somewhere, Martin Buber pointed out that the prophets did not go looking to be prophets. It was forced on them. For those individuals, there is no choice of subject—they can’t do anything else. If you are one of those people, then you’re not likely to be reading this essay. For every one of those prophets, though, how many poets write political poems to make themselves feel they are doing something? Probably too many. If we write the most honest and most personal poems we can write, prophecy will take care of itself.
Most poets notice rather quickly that they can only write from who they are, not from who they might want to be. At first, this appears to be a restriction, but it’s actually a gift. It keeps us honest, and our poems are better for that honesty. If poetry is going to connect with the reader, the reader has to believe in the reality of the poem. Yes, this is the way it would feel…. For the poem to be real, it must be as close to our actual experience as we can make it. We can invent, for sure, but the invention must stick close to the emotional and intellectual experience that underlies the poem. When we invent, such as in a persona poem, we should be even more scrupulous to avoid romanticizing or inflating the emotions or events of the poem. The further away we get from the poet sitting at a table, cobbling together words, the more we must ensure that the poem adheres to reality.
If the subject of lyric poetry is the conversation between the poet and the interlocutor that is the poet’s own self, what Stevens called the “Interior Paramour,” then it makes sense that our most urgent quarrels, the ones that give rise to poetry, are with ourselves, not with others. A political poem that is personal locates the quarrel within the poet, as much as it does with distant political figures. Since Auden was used as the bad example above, it’s only fair to use him as the good example now. In “September 1, 1939,” writing about what he was thinking and what it felt like as he sat in a New York bar while German tanks overran Poland, Auden not only speculated on how the phenomenon of Hitler was created but wrote of himself, “Out of the mirror they stare, / Imperialism’s face / And the international wrong.” Auden is not placing himself above those “Faces along the bar” that “Cling to their average day.” The poem is effective because he acknowledges that he is one of them. Similarly, he does not portray himself doing heroic deeds. At the end of the poem, he aspires only to “Show an affirming flame.”
The best kind of poetry that is written during a time of political crisis may be counter intuitive, not a poetry of activism but of humility. It does not preach, solve national problems, or tell other people what to do; rather, it partakes of that interior conversation in which the poet does not claim to speak for anyone else or to anyone but the private interlocutor who mysteriously is at once the self and not the self. The question that is answered by such a poem is not what strategy or tactics should be used or how someone should vote. Instead, the poem communicates what our lives feel like at this moment in history. It is our report back to the poets who came before us as well as our time capsule hurriedly buried for the poets who will come later.