'A Dubious or Questionable Medium'

In 1972, Daryl Hine, the editor of Poetry, requested poems “protesting the acceleration of the undeclared Indo-Chinese War” for a special issue to be published in September of that year. Hine said he would be “grateful to consider any poem on this terrible and topical subject that you might wish to contribute, as soon as possible.” The poems submitted and eventually published are what you would expect – tired, soft-headed propaganda written not for consumption by politicians – people who might actually take the actions called for -- but fellow poets. A.J.M. Smith titles a poem “Lines Written on the Occasion of President Nixon’s Address to the Nation, May 8^th, 1972,” including this: 

“The man in the box of glass

 Speaks to a million rooms

 With a sharp, determined face

 And an obstinate, truculent voice.

 He speaks of enlarging the war

 To hasten the coming of peace . . .”

 

Flaccid, tired stuff, even as prose. Of more interest are some of the letters from those who declined Hine’s invitation. Michael Hamburger, the poet and translator from the German, writes: “[I]n recent years I have come to feel that protest poems as such are a dubious or questionable medium because they aren't even read by the people whom one wants to affect, and because protest demands action or, failing that, very clear prose.”

 

Turner Cassity, applauds Hine’s “courage” for organizing a “protest-the-escalation issue,” but has nothing to offer: “Early on, the notion entered my subconscious that Viet Nam is simply what we have instead of India, and while, considered rationally, this may well be the most sinister of all the war’s aspects, at the creative level it is productive only of complacency. . . . War has had fewer poets than peace, but better, Homer alone being quite sufficient to tip the balance.”

 

A very different sort of poet, Basil Bunting, writes: “Poetry does not seem to me to have any business with politics. Whatever thoughts the war in Vietnam puts into my head, they are  not such as could be well expressed in any kind of verse.” Bunting adds:

 

“There’s not a soul who cares twopence what I or any other poet thinks about the war, Nixon, Wallace, marijuana, pills, oil spills, detergent advertisements or the fog from Gary. We are experts on nothing but arrangements and patterns of vowels and consonants, and every time we shout about something else we increase the contempt the public has for us. We are entitled to the same voice as anybody else with a vote, no more. To claim more is arrogant.”

 

I’m reminded of The Prolific and the Devourer, a book of aphorisms and prose reflections Auden worked on for much of 1939, abandoning it a few weeks after the Nazis invaded Poland from the west, around the time the Soviets were invading from the east. Newly arrived in the United States, Auden was shedding the vestigial sentimental Marxism he had once embraced and returning to the committed Christianity of his childhood. The full text wasn’t published until 1981, eight years after Auden’s death. The poet who had reminded us that “poetry makes nothing happen,” writes:

 

“If the criterion of art were its power to incite to action, Goebbels would be one of the greatest artists of all time.” Then he adds: “Artists and politicians would get along better in a time of crisis like the present, if the latter would only realize that the political history of the world would have been the same if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted or a bar of music composed.”