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Laura Bush, a former librarian, loves to read. So it made perfect sense that the First Lady would host a White House poetry symposium. The idea was to celebrate "Poetry and the American Voice,'' in particular the voices of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes.
These poets were blunt speakers. So, it turns out, were the poets invited to the White House symposium scheduled for February 12th. With war looming, many of them planned to read war poems --- that is, anti-war poems.
The White House response: "indefinitely postpone" the symposium.
The poets' response (because poets always get the last word): to invite writers to send their contributions to poetsagainstthewar.org and then to bombard the White House with anti-war poems on February 12th, a "Day of Poetry Against the War.''
The group has received 3,600 poems. And the protest has been endorsed not only by former U.S. poets laureate Stanley Kunitz and Rita Dove, but by current poet laureate Billy Collins, who has no history of political activism. "If political protest is urgent," Collins explained, "I don't think it needs to wait for an appropriate scene and setting and should be as disruptive as it wants to be."
Sam Hamill, the organizer of the poets' protest, suggested that the White House reaction shows "they clearly know very little about poetry or the nature of poets. Although poetry is written in solitude, it is social language, and all poems are political in one way or another."
He may be wrong about the political message in nature or love poems. But he's a good student of the history of poetry --- for almost a century, almost every war poem has been an anti-war poem.
Consider the famous "charge of the light brigade." In 1854, 600 British soldier followed a mistaken order and died when they advanced directly into the line of fire of Russian guns. Rather than address the screw-up, Tennyson wrote a patriotic poem, which included the famous line: "Theirs not to question why, theirs but to do and die." His countrymen applauded the sentiment.
At the start of World War I, "pro-war" poems were still hymns to patriotism. Rupert Brooke wrote:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed.
But as more poets went to the front and saw what war was like, notions of a purposeful death and a peaceful afterlife faded. Consider the last stanza of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est," which describes a mustard-gas attack:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
America was an ocean away. So when Carl Sandburg wrote "The Four Brothers" in 1917, his "war song" was unabashedly pro-war:
Cowpunchers, cornhuskers, shopmen, ready in khaki;
Ballplayers, lumberjacks, ironworkers, ready in khaki;
A million, ten million, singing, "I am ready."
This the sun looks on between two seaboards,
In the land of Lincoln, in the Land of Grant and Lee.
I heard one say, "I am ready to be killed."
I heard another say, "I am ready to be killed."
O sunburned clear-eyed boys!
I stand on sidewalks and you go by with drums and guns and bugles,
You -- and the flag!
And there pro-war poetry ends. Since World War I, poets have widened their focus. They still write about the men who fight and die. But they are also concerned about the people on the other end of those guns and bombs: civilian casualties, the women and children whose deaths are classified as "collateral damage." In this growing global consciousness, there's no such thing as a "good war" or the "right side" --- no one can "win" a war when war itself is a defeat.
On the other hand, the human heart --- the ultimate subject of poetry --- is elusive. Fixed, final answers aren't available. And so, with war looming and poets protesting and no clear view of the future, we ask:
- What kind of poem would you like to read now: pro-war or anti-war?
- Do you agree that all poems, regardless of their subject, have a political point-of-view?
- When you see that a poem (or a song lyric) has a political message, does that please you -- or turn you off?
- Was the White House naive to think it could invite writers to Washington and have them talk only about the non-political aspects of poetry?
- Have you written a poem about war? If so, may we read it?
We look forward to reading your responses --- and publishing many of them. Please Write to Us.
--- Jesse Kornbluth
© Copyright 1996-2010, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
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