'We Have No Gift to Set a Statesman Right'

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 . . .”