Poetry, Humanism, and “Political Man”

American Samizdat

An Indian poet seated in a cherry blossom garden. Painted during the reign of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, 1628-1658 (Public domain)

“This summer, you've struck me as being a bit like a 17th-century English poet, retired to his garden to write and reflect, who one day hears outside the walls the clamour of civil strife and so re-enters the public fray.”

The always eloquent and erudite essayist of the English Republic of Letters, Jeffrey Streeter, alerting me to my feelings before I knew them.

In his historic 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr. offers not any kind of technical, philosophical definition of just law but rather several different illustrations of such law, seeking, as it were, to find its coordinates, as if exchanging instruments on a surveyor’s tripod. My favorite, the most humanistically essential, tells us: “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

It is the essential evil of fascism — including what we see and hear in ugly, angry utterance each day from Donald Trump, his vice-presidential running mate, J.D. Vance, and their whole supportive GOP cartel of cruelty in the United States today — that it degrades human personality. It may claim to exalt some select and favored human natures, but by seeking to do so at the expense of the human dignity of others, fascism in truth degrades them all. It is, in contrast, in the lyrical essence of poetry to uplift human personality, which is why I wrote, “Poets are not necessarily antifascist. Poetry is antifascist. A poem is not necessarily antifascist. Poetry is antifascist.” By “uplift,” I don’t mean any cheery or sympathetic lifting the spirits. Poetry is not a Hallmark card or a pep talk. I mean, after King, raise up in dignity, and by dignity, I mean an essential value to one’s human individuality.

American Samizdat: The Way of Poetry Is the Way of Antifascism.

There are many ways to do this in art, in poetry, including confronting people with the full range of their tragic and failed existence. “Sing of human unsuccess / in a rapture of distress,” I quote, on the Homo Vitruvius Substack, W. H. Auden, one of my subjects here.

In the general disfavor in which I hold political poetry and art, I identified such art as being “of such clear political purpose that ideological tendency rules and overwhelms humanistic and aesthetic ends …, [in which] the drive is political rather than artful …, [and] political expression [is] dressed up as art.” I allowed that there are and can be many notable exceptions, but the exceptions, as the expression goes, prove the rule: however pronounced the art’s political program, it is the art that almost certainly makes it notable.

The Polsonal is Perlitical

What do we normally mean, though, when we speak of politics? In common modern usage, there are a number of closely related levels of reference, I think. At the highest level, we mean something close to political philosophy — we could call it ideology — networks of ideas about formal social organization that motivate people in their political belief and action. There are electoral politics, which Americans are experiencing now at its very greatest historical, national nadir. There’s what people call the sausage making of legislative law making, with all its dealing and tradeoffs and, too often, corruption. These latter two perform the major role in producing the contempt that most people express when they refer dismissively and hatefully to “politics.”

There is another level that I think we can locate between those first and second applications, in which citizens, sometimes professionally, or with amateur activism, work to influence the course of society, through policy and causes, working with or on office holders and the legal system to achieve these ends. This is a kind of politics that along with ideology will lead to artistic expression, none more often than through poetry, which is shorter and easier to produce and so easier to produce badly. As with the pining or broken heart, the poem will satisfy a politically agitated mind more quickly and less effortfully than a play, novel, or Eroica symphony.

The best kind of political poetry will be found in the creations of poets addressing what Aristotle calls our pollical animal, by which the philosopher meant, by which I mean, their social being seeking by nature to live in organized, cooperative community with others. This conception, too, is what I think Seymour Martin Lipset referred to in his great work of political sociology, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics: Political man, as Aristotle meant him, before he became political man muttering “it’s all politics” over a beer at the bar.

In W. B Yeats’s “Easter 1916” and W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” — arguably the two most renowned political poems in English of the 20^th Century — in their degree of likeness, we find the poets advancing no “politics” in the narrow ideological or tactical sense but instead reacting to just that kind of Aristotelian uprising around them, to their fellows acting as political animals in the world in that broader sense. In the poems’ degree of difference, and the greater success of one over the other, I think, lies some valuable instruction.

Auden famously — there are so many famous lines — opens the poem, a response to the Nazi invasion of Poland on that date, and before he speaks as the poet, as Twentieth Century man: “I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-second Street / Uncertain and afraid.” He closes, declaring his solidarity with ordinary citizens of the world, seeking to offer something, as poet, more:

May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

The poem is so famous, so regularly anthologized, that less devoted Audenites may not know the poet very quickly, and permanently, came to hate the poem and that after a revised republication, afterwards, with rare exception forbade the poem to be published again.

Auden’s disdain began with the problematic last line, perhaps the poem’s most famous of all, of the penultimate stanza: “We must love one another or die.”

Along with many readers, the poet quickly enough judged that we must die regardless. In revision, then, he went, instead, for “We must love one another and die.” That, I think, pleased no one, least of all Auden.

In the earlier version, Auden writes as a poetic pre-Beatle or John Lennon: “all you need is love,” “give peace a chance,” “Imagine there's no countries / It isn't hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for.” Fine for feel-good pop music, not so for poetic art seeking seriously to engage the world as it is. The apparently existential – veering on logical – binary choice reveals itself as a false dichotomy and more than a little softheaded. Yes, we will die regardless, and what’s more, we mustn’t love one another – we often don’t, sometimes for very good reason, and anyway, this will happen only in our dreams, maybe.

In the revised version, the sentiment reduces to the same folly, with platitude to boot.

In one of the exceptions to republication Auden allowed, the 1964 anthology Poetry of the Thirties, the poet permitted five poems he disliked to appear on the condition that editor Robin Skelton explicitly announce that “Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is ashamed to have written.”

Auden’s literary executor and biographer, Columbia’s Edward Mendelson, in Early Auden, quotes the poet stating, beyond the one problematic line: the “whole poem, I realized, was infected with an incurable dishonesty and must be scrapped.”

Mendelson offers more insight in “Revision and Power: The Example of W. H. Auden”: that Auden mistrusted how the “success of his power over words offered the temptation to use power over persons. So, when he revised his early drafts into publishable form, and, later, when he revised his published works for new editions, he repeatedly rejected his most compelling metaphors, and called attention to his own artifice.”

Auden dismissed “September 1, 1939” not because he disagreed, Mendelson says, with its “vaguely idealistic” politics “but because he distrusted [its] power to convince his readers that he and they were on the right side in the great struggles of the age, that they were ‘the just’ who exchanged messages through ‘ironic points of light.’”

Mendelson adds of Auden: “In so far as poetry, or any of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate."

The difficulty of Auden's position, as he acknowledged, is that a poem that disenchants and disintoxicates – a poem that reminds its readers of the flaws not merely in their world but, above all, in themselves – may not be a poem that an audience will want to read. His solution to this difficulty was a dialectical one, in which the formal and verbal beauty of a poem is an analogy of the order and coherence of some ultimate goodness, while the poem simultaneously insists that its own order is a fiction, that it is "an analogy, not an imitation." A poem can never show how to reconcile contradictions in the world of time and experience, but it can present an analogy of reconciliation through its own formal and verbal order; in that limited realm, contradictory feelings, languages, tones, and voices are contained and reconciled. [Emphasis added]

The arranged beauty of a poem is in the world, not of the world.

In criticizing the poem — the poetic beauty of which I love as much as any — I will go further.

In declining, Auden thought, to identify himself and his readers with “the just” and those “points of light,” he would presume to enter the dialectical fray but take no position other than to criticize. He identifies much that is blameworthy: “the whole offence / From Luther until now / That has driven a culture mad”; “All that a speech can say / About Democracy, / And what dictators do”; “Collective Man”; “Imperialism's face / And the international wrong”; “The windiest militant trash / Important Persons shout”:

. . . the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority

Yet Auden actually does enter the dialectical fray, in stating, contrary to all these ills, his desire to show that “affirming flame” amid the terror of Nazi and Imperial conquest and crushing Soviet oppression. What does it show forth?

That we must love another or die; that “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”

Can’t we all just get along?

It was in offering so empty an affirmation that Auden must have felt he had produced a poem of such “incurable dishonesty.”

It isn’t, in contrast, that Yeats succeeds where Auden fails. Yeats does something different.

Yeats does not, indeed, enter the fray. He does not engage the dialectic. And it is not that Yeats had no politics or had no views on even the particular topic of his poem, Ireland’s disastrous Easter uprising of 1916. It is that he has something other in view: the “stone” that is “in the midst of all.”

Rather than the activating ideas or ailments of Irish history and nationhood, Yeats devotes his attention to the people who struggled and suffered in light of them: “I have met them at close of day / Coming with vivid faces.” All of them, like Yeats, well known figures in Irish civic and aspiring Republican life, the poet didn’t necessarily like them as individuals. One of them, John MacBride, a “drunken, vainglorious lout,” was husband to Maud Gonne, Yeats’s longtime unrequited love and muse. The poet, who would go on to serve as a senator in the newborn Irish Republic, had not supported the Rebellion. But rather than argue politics, he feels compelled to acknowledge the animating commitments and sacrifice of those who died: “Yet I number him in the song; / He, too, has resigned his part / In the casual comedy.”

There is a “terrible beauty” in it.

And then there is “the stone.”

Yeats says of those he memorializes, those executed by the British, now dead, that they were “Hearts with one purpose alone,” who now seem (or seem to have been – the temporality, in context, is ambiguous) “Enchanted to a stone.” For Yeats, for any Irish nationalist and activist of the era steeped in the land’s cultural lore, this is likely, in part, a reference to the stone on the Hill of Tara, in County Meath, that became known as the Stone of Destiny, the traditional coronation site of ancient Irish Kings. But these Irish patriots were enchanted to the stone “To trouble the living stream,” so now the stasis that is the stone has been placed in disruptive contrast to transient human life and strife. Comes now a succession of vivid images, like the once vivid faces, we were told, of those now dead, set off by transience:

The rider, the birds that range   
From cloud to tumbling cloud,   
Minute by minute they change;   
A shadow of cloud on the stream   
Changes minute by minute;   
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,   
And a horse plashes within it;   
The long-legged moor-hens dive,   
And hens to moor-cocks call;  

The stone has been rendered, if not eternal, then at least transcendent, beyond and maybe even an imperturbable ground untouched by the infectious political discord of the kind English conquest bequeathed to Ireland for centuries: “Minute to minute they live; / The stone's in the midst of all.”

More, in this world, “Too long a sacrifice,” Yeats laments, “Can make a stone of the heart.”

How much sacrifice is sufficient?

“That is Heaven's part, our part / To murmur name upon name.”

I have read this poem aloud to rooms full of students more times than I can count, and my throat has never failed to catch at the closing recitation of names. (Bless the gods of time for the gifts of meter and rhyme.)

Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith   
For all that is done and said.   
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;   
And what if excess of love   
Bewildered them till they died?   
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride   
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:   
A terrible beauty is born.

Here I repeat Mendelson on Auden:

A poem can never show how to reconcile contradictions in the world of time and experience, but it can present an analogy of reconciliation through its own formal and verbal order.

Postscript

“Poets are not necessarily antifascist. Poetry is antifascist. A poem is not necessarily antifascist. Poetry is antifascist.”

Auden was the younger of the two poets by far, an admirer of Yeats, composer, upon the elder’s death, of the magnificent “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” and heir to his reputation among English language poets. Both, too, very differently, were implicated in the life and legacy of Ezra Pound. As a dazzlingly precocious young poet, the American Pound had served Yeats as secretary and lived with him at Stone Cottage in England, significantly influencing the elder’s modern turn. That period ended with Pound’s departure for Paris. In England and France, Pound established the legacy of his influence on Modernism. Auden played a role in the contentions of Pound’s post-Second World War cultural legacy.

By late 1927, Pound had already been living in Rapallo, Italy for three years when Yeats and his wife, George, came to live also for a time, joining other writers around Pound in Rapallo in a kind of coterie. Pound had already by then also well established his antisemitic bona fides, and Mussolini had been in power since 1922, when he seized the government. It is fair to say that the literary Modernists, generally speaking, were aesthetically modern but largely politically reactionary, when not naively Marxist. Many, most, abjured modernity. It is fair to say, too, that few showed themselves politically sophisticated. Often, like Yeats and Pound, differently, influenced by eccentric aesthetic and spiritual, rather than social and political, visions of historical development, many succumbed during the critical period of the 1920s and 30s to both extremes, before in most cases learning, with the very notable exception of Pound, to reject them.

In her The Poets of Rapallo: How Mussolini's Italy shaped British, Irish, and U.S. Writers, Lauren Arrington details that discrete place and period during these years. We learn that long before his extended Rapallo visit, Yeats, while serving as a senator in the new Irish Free State, had become enamored of Mussolini and the ideas of Gabriele D'Annunzio (see: “American Samizdat: Fascismo Intellettuale”).

American Samizdat: Fascismo Intellettuale

Auden enters this picture after World War II. By this point, Pound has been psychiatrically hospitalized in the U.S. in lieu of his imprisonment for fascist and Nazi collaboration. In 1948, still early in Pound’s long hospitalization, amid much pressure from literary lights to release him, he was awarded the first ever Bollingen Prize for Poetry, for his Pisan Cantos, written while imprisoned in Italy. by the American military. (I write about this in more detail in “I Have Tried to Write Paradise.”)

From the Archives: “I Have Tried to Write Paradise”

This prize award became one of the most contentious and controversial events in American literary history. Three years earlier, in 1945, Mendelson tells us, while preparing to publish An Anthology of Famous English and American Poetry, Bennett Cerf of Random House had omitted 12 of Pound’s early poems, which had been included by editors William Rose Benét and Conrad Aiken, and announced as much. This, too, caused great controversy, in which Auden’s long-unknown role is fascinating.

The younger poet, again, while declaring himself not at all an admirer of Pound’s poetry, objected to the politically motivated excision of poetry, on the political grounds announced, that was not itself objectionable. In Auden’s correspondence with Cerf, he offers one of the best defenses I have read in the perennial debate over separating the person from the art. As a matter of principle, Auden went so far as to sever his otherwise excellent relationship with Random House. In the exchange of letters that followed, both men account for themselves well, and when Cerf and Random House ultimately reverse their decision, so does Auden.

Advance, however, to 1948, and Auden, serving now as one of the inaugural Fellows in American Letters of the Library of Congress — the Bollingen Prize Committee — is not one of the three Fellows who object to and refuse to endorse the award to Pound. This would seem to show Auden being consistent. I think it does not.

In the matter of the anthology, as much or more than the question of any distinction to be drawn between writers and their literary art, there was the question – raised by Auden in a different way – of fascistic repression of the historical record. An anthology is a historical record of the important and influential poetry of its time. To attempt to alter it on political grounds, worse even than fascistic, is totalitarian.

In contrast, a prize awarded to an artist for a contemporaneously produced work of art — however much the art may be the announced cause of the award — stands as a very different matter. It offers expression of current values, and by awarding the prize to the person, very far from separating the man, in this case, from his work, unites them and commits the inexcusable offense of affirming that we honor an estimation of aesthetic worth over its price in human damage. (One can enjoy the poetry in private, if one can — it isn’t necessary to crown the wretched head.)

So, as it turned out, did the Library of Congress — a government institution — decide, by disassociating itself from the prize. Yet not only did the Fellows write in defense of their award — declaring the recognition of aesthetic merit to be some kind of objectively higher value than the immoral acts implicated in the prize; the detailed background record leading to the award makes clear that it served as a concerted effort by friends and poetic admirers of Pound, who believed that they and poetry owed him a debt, to whitewash his extensive and profound offenses and resurrect his reputation.

The award to Pound — who on his release from Elizabeth’s Hospital 8 years later, on first landing in Italy, offered the fascist salute — stands as a disgrace to the world of poetry, which, embodied in its representatives of the time, chose elitist aestheticism and personal, friendly allegiance over humanistic concern for the millions of lives Pound had worked to villainize and destroy.

Why do I offer this postscript to the more praiseworthy record of the poems I consider above?

Because we face such moral challenges now, in these few remaining weeks before the 2024 American presidential election: whether we will commit our actions and our lives to the best of what the human spirit can inspire, to uplifting human personality, as we do in the spirit of poetry, or to degrading human being, and ourselves — as poets, too, like other people, will sometimes do, to the shame of all.  

AJA

Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.

ajayadler.com