'But They Are Very Bad Poems'

Eugenio Montale speaking with an interviewer, American poet W.S. Di Piero, in 1973: 

“Political ideas are best expressed in prose. Why should we express political ideas in such an abstruse language as poetry? If I were to write against the war in Viet Nam, I would write in prose, or I would do something else to oppose the war directly instead of just dressing up my poems with references to Viet Nam as if pouring a sauce over the poems to prepare them for public consumption. One cannot inject or force the Viet Nam War into poetry simply for effect. It serves no real purpose, and whoever does so finally fails in every way.”

 

The literary legacy left by the Vietnam War, both civilian and military, is modest. Compared to World War I, it is almost nonexistent. “Anti-war” poems that filled magazines, chapbooks, posters and broadsheets were simplistic, shrill and soon forgotten. Literary values were abandoned for the sake of self-righteousness. A rare exception was R.L. Barth, a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, who sent me a recent poem, “Skating,” subtitled “Camp Reasoner”:

 

“It’s ninety-five degrees.

I’m just not running. Damn,

What’s Gunny gonna do,

Send me to Vietnam?”

 

Bob adds: “A good half the time, that line would have been capped by someone else saying, ‘There it is.’” The poem is written in the voice of a grunt, an enlisted man, not a purported deep thinker about war and geopolitics. Montale was not politically naïve. His early work was written while Mussolini was in power. The poet had no use for fascism. In the interview, Di Piero asks, “What about the poet's treatment of contemporary public events?” Montale replies:

 

“As to public events, I'm aware of the many poems which have been published about the war in Viet Nam. These poems have a very high moral value, but they are very bad poems.”

 

Montale explains an unpleasant and paradoxical fact, best represented by the fate of poetry in Poland during the Soviet occupation: “Poetry has everything to gain from persecution. If the state were to patronize or protect the arts, there would be such an abundance of pseudo-artists, pretenders to art, that you wouldn't know quite how to fend them off!”

 

[The Montale interview was published in the January/February 1974 issue of the American Poetry Review. Di Piero is “assisted” by Rose Maria Bosinelli.]