In 1915, Edith Wharton edited a charity volume, The Book of the Homeless, aimed at raising funds for Belgian civilians displaced by the fighting in Europe. The writers she mustered form an impressive lineup and include Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, George Santayana and the aptly named Herbert Trench. She even got former president Theodore Roosevelt to contribute a brief introduction:
“At the
outset of this war I said that hideous though the atrocities had been and
dreadful though the suffering, yet we must not believe that these atrocities
and this suffering paralleled the dreadful condition that had obtained in
European warfare during, for example, the seventeenth century. It is lamentable
to have to confess that I was probably in error.”
A politician
admitting he has made an error in judgment is usually worth contemplating. Much of
what follows in Wharton's collection is not. Henry James, always worth reading, concludes in his late-period manner:
“. . . I believe in Culture.” Conrad finishes his essay on a rare personal
note: “Turning instinctively to look at my boys, I happened to meet my wife’s
eyes. She also had felt profoundly, coming from far away across the grey
distances of the sea, the faint boom of the big guns at work on the coast of
Flanders—shaping the future.”
Most of the
poems, sorry to say, are mediocre. Poets are not renowned for discretion, good taste
or common sense when it comes to politics. Most often, you can’t shut them up. Remember
Poets Against War, dedicated in 2003 to “the tradition of socially engaged
poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and
oppression”? Awful, tin-eared stuff that didn’t prevent a single death. In
Wharton’s anthology, the finest single contribution is William Butler Yeats’ “A
Reason for Keeping Silent.” Yeats was not notably given to diffidence, but here
he makes an exception:
“I think it
better that at times like these
We poets
keep our mouths shut, for in truth
We have no
gift to set a statesman right;
He’s had
enough of meddling who can please
A young girl
in the indolence of her youth
Or an old
man upon a winter’s night.”
Yeats wrote
the poem on February 6, 1915 and originally titled it, rather flat-footedly, “To
a friend who has asked me to sign his manifesto to the neutral nations.” The
friend was Henry James. When Yeats collected the poem in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), he retitled it a second time: “On Being Asked for a War Poem.” He also revised the start of the second line to the more formal, less pleasing “A poet’s mouth be silent . . .”
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