Revolution and Poetry

If I were less ignorant, I could give a conspectus and history of revolutionary poetry; but I found that I did not know enough, and that when I faced up to the question I was not even sure that I could identify revolutionary poetry or say whether (if there is such a thing) it was called revolutionary because of its nature or origins or motives or effects.  So deprived of comforts and amenities of the historical method, I find myself forced back upon the tedious necessity of thinking the thing out for myself.

I

First of all: the word revolution is often used as a synonym for rebellion, perhaps because it sounds a little grander and has more of a cosmic sweep to it; but the two can be seen as distinct.  A child can be rebellious, but few children are revolutionary.  And I take it that we are thinking of those movements in human affairs – such as are now occurring in the province of Quebec – which define the successive steps of our advance from barbarism to enlightenment, from an existing (and therefore undesirable) condition to a future (and therefore more desirable) state of affairs.  Revolution is a process: rebellion is either an attitude of mind or a phase in the process of revolution.  Rebellion as an attitude of mind may arise from petulance, from a chronic sense of injustice, grievance, frustration, perpetual misinformation, a deep-rooted habit of saying NO to anything and everything, a sense of exquisite but undeserved isolation, or a bad digestion.  If this account of rebelliousness is at all true, poets must be often and easily rebellious, though for reasons that we need not examine here.  But are poets revolutionary?

Revolution, like law, is a metaphor.  Revolution is not, as one might expect, a metaphor of turning upside down: it refers to the turning of a wheel, a process that passes cyclically through definable phrases.  Aristotle – not Marx, as far as I know – first set down the sequence, drawing his inferences from his study of the changes in the form of government.  A conqueror sets up a despotism, himself as tyrant holding absolute power: (the word tyrant in Greek refers to the absoluteness of the power, not to the cruel or inhuman use of it).  Tyranny gradually changes into monarchy; the right-to-rule becomes hereditary and traditional, and class distinctions establish mutual responsibility between the ruler and some of his subjects so that the king becomes primus inter pares.  The nobility then supplants the monarchy and establishes an aristocracy.  But once leadership becomes privilege rather than a social obligation, aristocracy degenerates into oligarchy – the rule of the few; and oligarchy in turn degenerates into democracy – mob rule.  Democracy falls into the hands of the first leader clever enough to seize and keep control of the mob; and we have a tyranny again, and the cycle starts over again.  The cycle is the turning wheel – the revolution of the metaphor.  Except at the transition from tyranny to monarchy (where the rule of arbitrary power changes to the rule of moral obligation) the process of revolution is a sequence of triumphs of a “lower” order over a “higher” order, the affirmation of the principle of “Freedom” or “Liberty” against the tyrannous – because obsolete – authority of a scheme which has grown out of touch with life and the needs of life.

To detect cyclic schemes and patterns in the flux of human affairs is a tempting comfort to historian and analyst.  But Aristotle’s analysis is acute, and his metaphor has become permanent.  Marx, with the absolutism that is never judged to be tyrannous if the scheme be proletarian enough, decided that there must be an end to this interminable social-political game of Bottoms Up: there must be a Revolution to end Revolution.  The dictatorship of the masses would be followed by a relatively short though regretable phase of bureaucracy while the old guard were being quietly disposed of; then the dawn would break, the state would end, and social perfection would be established permanently – to the greater good of man.  No longer would the turning of the Great Wheel bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the Spring, nor any aristocrat of wealth, birth, or fortune to dominate his fellows.

This digression into (what I take to be) Marxism is necessary.  Could it be said that Marx in such matters is a dyed-in-the-wool realist?  Can he be absolved of all taint of the prophetic visionary?  When we examine the philosophical machinery by which the Law of Necessity becomes absolute, we find it in a process called dialectic – struggle, strife, discord between opposites.  Hegel had preached a dialectic of ideas, as though ideas did not change their color, force, and meaning in being passed from one mind to another or from one setting to another.  Marx wanted something more elemental (which for the Communist means something non-human or abstract).  Political and social energy he personified into Necessity: nobody, in his view, and nothing could stand before the silent tread of this brainless autocrat Necessity; in the end all would be well, and all manner of things would be well, and mankind would come to haven in a paradise (where, one might note in passing, the luxuriance of the flowers owed something perhaps to the blood of the bourgeoisie with which the ground had been so liberally sprinkled).

An Idea, in the Hegelian sense, is a kind of picture in the mind, a diagram of the order of things actual or desired.  Since Ideas are not empirically derived, and cannot be shown to be logically connected with what in reason or custom we accept, they must be taken on faith, or trust, or hope.  If the Idea is indeed an account of the structure of the moral universe, it is a myth.  But most social ideas are not, in this sense, myths – a myth being a large imaginative structure, not a conceptual scheme or series of propositional statements.  Nevertheless, ideas can inflame men to great feats of self-abnegation; ideas can become leading lights or seamarks or beacons blazing in the hills, or the smoky flames rising from the wreck of an ambassador’s staff-car, or from the saturated stump of some monkish enthusiast whose composure seems insolently unaffected by the willing dissolution of his body.  Ideas may tempt their advocates to force the Idea on others: and when a myth is handled in this way, it too becomes an Idea.

The transition from one phase in the revolution of the wheel to another may be processive, unmarked by violence, “bloodless” we say with relief as though all revolution must be bloody.  Indeed, we mostly think of the transitional phases in revolution as violent and destructive (though necessarily so) – like a flame set in dry grass, like a river overflowing its banks, or a dam bursting: the same elements in the same sort of context, but lawless, running wild, demonstrating (as a car out of control does) a horrifying change of state; the power showing unexpectedly as ferocious and unbiddable (as in civilized societies it should not) in the eyes and teeth and the convulsive movements of the hands.  What releases the social power is usually the one idea under different names and figures: Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, the casting off of chains, the treading down of oppression; the triumph of the simple and needy, the ingenuous, God’s children; the restoration of life to creatures bent so under the burden of an alien life that there is scarcely any life in them.  Our response to such calls is immediate and profound.  Who does not stir to the resonance of the word Freedom?  Who would not wish to stand at the barricades (though preferably surviving)?  Who would not wish to stale and foul the inner sanctuaries of a bloated and over-dainty indulgence, and restore the mind and senses to a cleaner and more sober life, astringent as ears of wheat in the palm of the hand?  The men grow beards; the girls practise musketry and take the field to render radical comfort to their comrades under arms; the children even face the tanks with Molotov cocktails or if need be with nothing more than the shrill effrontery of indignant guttersnipes.

I am not myself a revolutionary; am not interested in the patterns of power nor intrigued by the chances of exercising power.  What I know about these things is what I hear and observe and read.  I have not swung a cutlass in the salt marshes, nor attended with zest the ingenious dismemberment by hand of enemies in public thoroughfares under a bright sun.  Yet it is clear to me that at a certain moment patience runs out, and the power that is in itself no more menacing than the firing pin of an uncocked pistol, suddenly is set free.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

A desperate minority emerges, ascetically dedicated (usually to the death) to destroy “the vested interests of the reactionary.”  The Idea is a banner, abruptly and finally distinct and unalterable.  A mechanism is set in motion; an essential starting-point is the depersonalizing abstraction by which the Idea spreads, like a blaze of light or a stain, to cover the whole of life, and the Enemy are defined in a mortal category, to be pitilessly destroyed.  The Americans were lucky: their Enemy was not on the spot – they could have their Revolution by correspondence.  Not so the French, or the Russians, or the Hungarians.  The movement that springs from the solitary and astonishing vision of one man, is now no longer personal but social; no longer particular and universal, but general and abstract.  A mass movement is in flood; no one person can any longer keep his head above it or stand against it; and nobody can say where it will end.  Courage, purpose, fanatical concentration on a few essentials, a murderous disregard for personal safety, a contemptuous disregard for order and decency: all these are brought into instant and blazing intensity, a burning-glass of withering power.  Here surely is dignity, man rising to his full stature against the dragons of injustice, facing hazard and humiliation unprotected and without flinching.  Almost the only thing we can be sure of is that, if the timing is good, practically nothing can stop the march of these forces.  And we can be sure that when the victory has been won, and silence drains back into the twisted and derelict streets, there will be some rueful thoughts as we wash the blood from our hands and arms; and we will look at ourselves with disgusted amazement, catching through the chinks of a sickening triumph, the glimpse of a self-betrayal.  We have taken the law into our own hands; our indignation made it clear that we were right to do so; and yet the stains – one our hands and on our hearts – we had not thought the Law had this color.

For the Law is a metaphor too – first introduced, I think, by Francis Bacon.  Suppose (the metaphor implies), suppose the universe governed by an intelligent authority as a society is governed by a disinterested ruler; the ruler makes laws for the good of society which, on pain of punishment or deprivation, are to be obeyed.  The threads of structural continuity that hold the universe together, the metaphor implies, bind us in much this same way – whoever made the laws: if we disobey them, we do so at the pain of punishment or deprivation.  To be master of one’s own fate has a good Whitmanish ring to it; to take the law into one’s own hands has a fine swashbuckling note to it.  But is not tragedy the exploration of what happens to us when we take the law into our own hands?  Tragedy is not an account of illegal disaster, of Fate interfering from outside: it tells us how, by instinct, we may set about methodically to destroy ourselves from within, and fascinated watch ourselves doing it.  Good intentions, good motives, a self-disregarding concentration upon some point of abstract principle – all these are part of the scheme, but they are never half enough.  Tragedy is not only a scheme but a mechanism; and once set in motion the process of self-betrayal is continuous and irreversible.  Law is something other than the vested interest of reactionary lawyers; perhaps the law is easier to break than to understand, simply because we are the Law: the law of the universe is always our Law because we see it with our own minds; we have access to the Law when we know ourselves; we have access to ourselves when we know the Law.  When we defy the Law, tragedy says, we destroy ourselves; when we break the Law, we break ourselves.  We know by action; we know what we are by what we do and by what happens to us in the doing – for every thought and action looks forward and backward.  Yeats, in a poem written shortly before his death, looked back over his life as a man of influence.  What had he done unwittingly?

Did that play of mine send out

Certain men the English shot?

Did words of mine put too great strain

On that woman’s reeling brain?

Could my spoken words have checked

That whereby a house lay wrecked?

And all seems evil until I

Sleepless would lie down and die.

Even if the revolution succeeds, and the end approves the means, the emotional debauch is followed by a haunting and desolate sense of betrayal.  And the sense of guilt, coming on us asleep or awake, gathers to itself like a nightmare the images of brutal insensibility, of high principle brought to self-deception, the anguish of a self-mutilation that cannot justify itself in ascetic denial or surgical release: futile, fantastic, corrupt.

II

My account of revolution probably lacks the broad information and benign detachment that is expected of “sound scholarly work.”  I want to make clear that, as far as I can see, revolution is not only something we do or can do – like voting, or selling insurance, or skin-diving – but something that happens to us.  We become possessed; we renounce part of ourselves in yielding to those parts which are exclusively identified with the revolution.  We become instruments (bagpipes, French-Canadian horns?) through which the winds of Destiny or History or Necessity concert their tunes.  Is this not much like one of the dominant pictures of the poet – also Mr. Layton’s picture – the poet as the man possessed?  Is it then the case that the poet is par excellence the instrument of revolution, the revolutionary leader?  For is he not “the unacknowledged legislator of the world”?  Now surely is a good time to examine the relation between revolution and poetry without the risk of parody.  There is revolution in the air, and not only in the province of Quebec; and not all of it can be confidently forecast as gallows-work and public dismemberment of back-benchers.  Canadian poetry is more vigorous and inventive than it has ever been before.  We hear more and more insistently about a new wave of revolutionary poetry running side by side with outspoken demands for social and political reform.  Does this perhaps mark the real intersection of revolution and poetry in our time?  Let me turn aside for a moment to attempt the impossible: that is, to try to say what I think poetry is.

As Coleridge observed, it is so impossible to say what poetry is without saying what a poet is that I start with the poet.  He is by constitution a person of unusual awareness, his sensibility being broad, exact, and vigorous.  His awareness gives him a peculiar sense of the present; and this, in comparison with the defensive and formulated response of other persons, makes him seem to be able to see into the future, but in fact his intense concentration upon the present gives him special access to the past and the future.  His concern is not with things but with relations – relations between himself and things and persons and ideas and places and experiences, and relations between any of all these without his being implicated beyond the necessary and undetached implication of the exact observer.  Poems can be projections of desire; but what the best poems are, and what mature poets seem always striving towards is – not the fulfilment of desire – but the making and realising of vision.  The “detachment of the artist” arises not from his withdrawal from experience: rather, it marks his ability – refreshing and liberating – of being able to apprehend what is not a projection of himself: he may, by grace, make things which are not in his own image.  Desire easily masquerades as Vision: and it is not easy to give ground rules for telling hallucination from vision; but desire holds us in a prison of ourselves, while vision – by bringing us to what is not ourselves, and relating us to a world not made over into our own tautological image – releases us from ourselves so that we discover both ourselves and the world.  Again, poems are things-made, not self-expressions; they are expressive surely, but what is important is not so much what they express as that they are examples of a certain order of existence and relation, and of a certain order of complexity and energy.  Poems are, one by one, existences in their own right, independent (once made) of their makers; each being a universe, a garden, a room, self-contained, with its own language and customs which we, as well-mannered guests, must learn quickly if we are not to behave like brash and insulting tourists.  When I say a universe, I mean (as Yeats has it) something single, globelike, whole; corresponding in this respect to the state of imagination out of which alone (according to Coleridge and others) a true poem, a universal poem – can grow.  Such a state is “the poet described in ideal perfection.”

            Again, whatever else a poem is, it is a word-thing, a thing made out of language.  For poetry there is no definable quality: but poetry is a state into which language may fall and into which a person may (by grace) come.  When that state occurs (imagination) the poem finds itself (no matter how skilful, intelligent, and deliberate the poet’s control during the whole process of composition) and goes its own way and becomes itself and is itself.  The word made flesh is an existence, in its own right, integral and singular, intersecting with other universes no doubt, but nevertheless very distinctly and exquisitely itself and nothing else.  Then I would say that poetry finds its universality by its sharp, almost obsessive concentration upon the particular.  In renouncing the obvious and safe but approximate connections of generalisation, the poet always seeks the luminous particular – in detail, place, experience, word, tune, rhythm – that can release a profound (and therefore indefinable and untranslatable) universal recognition.  The poet enters into the world of imaginative structures by turning away from generality, even from logic, even from that other veiled logic of grammar and semantics, to find, invent, make (if need be, from scratch) the way words and phrases can hold together with the inevitability of a fugal pattern, and the self-evidence of a dream.  When this poetical thing happens to a person and to language, we say “imagination” has happened, which is neither moonshine nor make-believe but access to the whole world of universal realities which (though uninteresting enough under general categories) is infinite and unique and inexhaustible.

On the one hand, the poem draws us into the universe of real and deep relations – the only world that anybody would seriously want to enter or live in; on the other hand, the poem becomes a sort of angel announcing an order of the world that is the birthright of all us – the world of imagination which is the world of supreme reality.  The symptoms of that world are few, paradoxical, and astonishing.  Existence and form become coincident; here order arises, self-shaping, out of a chaos of dark and compelling vitality which is also the world of our radical life; simple and complex are in luminous conjunction, so that what is complex can be seen in a simple order and the simple – like an atom or a universe – is breath-takingly complex. Freedom, which looked simple enough as the great revolutionary clarion-call, is seen at the heart of poetry as complex and self-determinate; here freedom consorts with necessity, freedom within deftly chosen limits becomes energy realizing itself in grace.

Every good poem is a triumph of law, and an announcement of the existence of a law of the universe – our universe – that we are attempted to renounce.  It is in this sense alone that poets are the legislators of the world: they remind us constantly – because this is the only source for their work and the source cannot be separated from the work – of the way the world is made, our world, the world of relations, the world of knowing, remembering, loving.  The poet is always making images of our world, or parts or aspects of it; presenting us with visionary glimpses of what we are, and what we might be, and where we are, and how: but in a way so ungeneralised that there is always the whiplash sting of accusation: this is not about, this is: this is not all people or all life in general, but each single and particular person, each life, each instant, each place.  The poets do not make the laws: they make poems; and these, arising only out of a certain order of life, and that order radical to human life altogether, establish, assert, evolve, analyse, and commend the fundamental laws of our life.

III

I started by guessing that poets were rebellious but not revolutionary.  But now it begins to look as though the poet, as I have described him, would be just the person to lead a revolution, to provide the songs and images that could set a country ablaze, that could by his insistent needling and haggling at the vices and evils of our days encourage us to take arms against intolerable injustice and confusion.  Yet I think not.  If we think of the poets that could with reason be called revolutionary, they are a strange group because they are “revolutionary” in a number of different ways – sometimes in a political sense, sometimes artistic.  Here are a few names: Blake, Shelley, Yeats, Pound, Whitman, Smart, Auden, Lorca, Goya, Schönberg, Bach.  Yet who is to say that art cannot reform life, or that a change in literary procedure may not announce and even produce social change?  Let us pick out two obvious ones: Shelley and Yeats.

Shelley wanted to be a revolutionary: he wanted to initiate and support a revolution, and with the rest of mankind to reap the benefits of it.  He found that flying balloons and distributing pamphlets and urging insurrection in Ireland met with less success than he expected.  He may have noticed that nobody much was marching behind him; he certainly caught a glimpse of real political life that spoiled his taste for indiscriminate bloodshed.  He turned away from the work of a practising revolutionary and concentrated on what he was best at – writing poetry.  A better pistol-shot than Byron, he never had a chance to lead a ragged and rebellious rabble.  As a poet, he would be “the trumpet of a prophecy” so that he could by the incantation of his verse

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

The words Shelley wrote were not, however, a political programme, nor a scheme for action.  They were simply an Idea (in the Platonic sense), a vision of human life perfected, in which man – released from the bondage of fear and hatred – would come to his full stature daemonic.  But the release would be neither easy nor instantaneous: “This is the consequence of the habits of a state of society to be produced by resolute perseverance and indefatigable hope, and long-suffering and long-believing courage, and the systematic efforts of generations of men of intellect and virtue.”  What he hoped to do – and one understands his frustrated impatience and testiness – was to kindle “within the bosoms of my readers a virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither violence nor misrepresentation nor prejudice can ever totally extinguish among mankind.”  The Revolt of Islam was narrative, not didactic: Prometheus Unbound was not didactic and discursive, but symbolic and visionary, stylised to the point where the mind was its own image and even dramatic tension had vanished.  His end as poet was to construct symbols, and to correlate them into a myth.  As a myth-maker he was perhaps neither as deft nor as self-conscious as Yeats (himself an incorrigible myth-maker) reported; but there is a remarkable if inattentive singleness to Shelley’s work.

The more distinct the symbolism, and the most substantial and intricate the myth, the farther removed from any mundane or identifiable social life.  The movement towards symbolism is the movement away from the actual towards the real.  It is the business of Art to be unlike Life in order to delineate and celebrate Life.  About this Shelley was himself clear: “It is the business of the Poet to communicate to others the pleasure and the enthusiasm arising out of those images and feelings in the vivid presence of which within his own mind consists at once his inspiration and his reward.”  Shelley’s imagery was the imagery of the mind: he was not a “Nature-poet.”  And Yeats, searching that country as a boy and a young man, found there abiding symbols for his own use, to be used as not even Shelley had used them.

Yeats, again, bemused by Maud Gonne, even thought for some years that he might become a leader in the Irish movement towards Freedom, and tried as earnestly as an unrequited lover could to follow Maud’s crack-brained inconstant political dream.  There is no question that Yeats wrote some memorable political verses – songs that any Irishman can recall with a stinging sense of political irony even though they may not be suitable for shouting at the barricades – but these would not make him much reputation if they were not among the writings of a man of much greater stature.  His most memorable political poem surely is Easter 1916: and that poem (Maud thought it trivial) is memorable because of its statement that even political devotion can transfigure a man.  The men who were shot – selfish, drunken, vain-glorious, inconsequent, half-mad – were transfigured by their single-hearted and hopeless devotion.  The poem tells us – with what tense and sorrowful force – not what the men fought for or died for, but simply that they died and were executed, that their cause was probably ill-considered but that they will be remembered, that they have become Cuchulains, heroes fighting the sea hopelessly and mortally.  Love we know can transfigure a man; hatred can; but who ever thought that political zeal could transfigure a man, or devotion to a cause that was by all odds a long way from being either obviously right or definitely good.  Even politics!  And this too, in the poem, is part of the cycle of life; perhaps not only part of human possibility but of human necessity.  Yet not very much like the mechanistic Necessity of the Marxian revolution.  Yet not very much unlike the inner necessity that in tragedy not only destroys a man from within but ennobles him in his destruction and ennobles mankind in the witnessing of it.  For tragedy is not warning but purification.

IV

A political revolution needs an Idea: at some point it must be fixed and generalized: it must become doctrine and so move out of the field of vision so that, by leaving the field of oblique or absent-minded action, it may enter the field of deliberate and coordinated action.  It is at this point that a poet – whether promptly or with some hesitation and delay – leaves the revolutionaries.  The poet, pivoted on the present, is an antenna: he sees what is happening and so cannot help to see what will happen.  He lives with the great images of permanent life and relation: everything he thinks and sees falls into relation with these.  He is the person who may catch the phrase or image, or write the verses or hum the tune that will, in the end, shape and lead the revolution.  But wherever the machine or revolution, the deliberate scheme of directed will, passes out of the field of vision into the field of action, the poet is left aside – and must be: for the vision is constantly changing, and his vision is constantly changing.  The world is constantly changing: it will not even stay still long enough to be changed into the form we want to change it to.

Freedom, liberty, equality – these are large themes because they are very small indeed when they germinate from the vivid centre of the small universes of our loves and perceptions.  We disarm our vision when we try to expand it to a cosmic scale: the scale of our vision is already cosmic, for it is centred on our own universe, our own order, our only world.  When we become social, we generalize, we become abstract, we lose the thread.  Poets, like anybody else, can get hysterical and frightened: they can write verses that appear to be poetry and which yet have little kinship with the order or nature of poetry.  What (for example) makes us think that there is anything more horrible about Hiroshima or Dresden then about the methodical carving-up of a girl friend in a vacant lot – or the slow destruction of another person by affectionate possessiveness?  We cannot possibly come into relation with the multiple deaths of Hiroshima or Dresden; and our attempts to do so stammer off into thin rhetoric or – if we are most honest – into incoherent grief.  But listen to this – which to my mind is as much to the point of Hiroshima (which occurred after it) as Edith Sitwell’s incantation of liturgical horror. 

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,

Robed in the long friends,

The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother

Secret by the unmourning water

Of the riding Thames.

After the first death, there is no other.

Rhetoric is an attempt to raise the emotional level by means other than symbolical – that is, by means other than imaginative of or poetical: by raising the voice, by accumulating high-sounding words, by indulging the “passionate intensity” that Yeats condemns rather than by scouring life to the bone with Swift’s saeva indignatio.  Understatement is better; yet it too can become a habit of rhetoric, a superlative trick by inversion.  Anger, satire, indignation – all of these can easily become, like facetiousness, forms of defensive rhetoric, escapes from the much more difficult task of precision, pointedness, symbolic exactitude, the terrible brilliance of vision, honesty.  To ruminate over the threat of atomic weapons, or upon the stain of guilt that spreads from the dropping of bombs or the villainy of politicians, is one thing.  There is a political indignation that can burst into flame and singe more than the sleeve of a coat, as there is a lyrical power of intellect that can – at the turn of phrase or a thought or a glimpse of an idea or even an equation – move with the catlike stealth of a dancer.  But this is rare, because the centres of gravity are elsewhere: not in the head, not in the ephemeral history-making events of the wars which may in the end prove less memorable than Homer’s Catalogue of Ships, or than the batting average of heroic baseball players.

The poets are the legislators (though unacknowledged), the delineators of the law.  They are revolutionaries in their continuous affirmation of human values, of the precious vulnerability of what is worth living for and dying for.  But they are as deft in destroying a revolution as they are in encouraging one; for they cannot stop – even for long enough for the revolt to be mounted and to succeed.  They must move on to a restatement – even if thinking socially and politically – to a new vision, a rediscovery of what being always old is also always new.  Sheer magnitude – the state, the world, thousands of deaths, millions of injustices – is for the poet nothing beside the turning of a snail in the sun or the sudden flash of delight as a cluster of words meets in due consort.  If it is sheer magnitude we are looking for for themes, we do not have to go far from home: here is lying enough, cynicism, duplicity in the name of civilisation, cruelty in the name of competition, wickedness massive enough and purulent enough surely to provide all the sense of guilt we can manage without bothering too much about new wars.  There is still about our lives the ancient horror of Cain’s first murder – the sheer startling inventiveness of it.  There are primal evils abroad, if it is dragons we want, and original sin to spare.  Yet even these homelike evils are not the poet’s business, though he may brood over them and watch them enchanted; nor is the curing of them, nor the driving out of devils.  Charms to keep the eyes straight and the heart pure are another matter: and so are all the recognitions of what is precisely itself and not by any means anything else, those things that in our making of them make us too, so that we are transformed and sanctified in the secular rite of creativeness.

The history of revolutionary periods in history does not encourage the view that political revolution and poetry go hand in hand.  Looking for evidence in the early revolutionary period of America, I found this curious note: “American writers were, by and large, engaged in non-belletristic pursuits.”  Which means, I suppose, that they weren’t writing much and what they did wasn’t very good.  That may well be typical: I am not aware that political revolt has produced any great poetry, though the episodes of revolution have provided themes for a few.  Political verse too easily becomes bird-limed with rhetoric and ham-strung by case-begging.  Yet there is revolutionary poetry, even though it isn’t particularly social or political.  Indeed, I should venture to suggest that all true poetry is revolutionary in as much as it dislodges us uncomfortably and disruptively from what we have no business taking for granted, and renews our sense of life, and restores us to the plain cycle of life.

But particularly I find this revolutionary power in the poetry that reminds us that we are “sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal,” and ignorant and perplexed.  I find the revolutionary power in the poems that have to do with the dignity of sorrow, the sorrowful dignity of compassion, Swift’s harsh indignation, the blaze of the bitter vision, the prospect of thorns; in the poems of life and death, and death-in-life; poems that are gay and disrespectful and make much of the inventiveness of words and the inventions of love; poems that celebrate; poems that remember the dispossessed in the small clenched fist of their private loneliness; the sanity of madness and the madness of grief, and the open wound of unfulfilment, and the courage to spit in the eye of fate, and at the end when there is no hope to “Rage, rage for the dying of the Light.”

Which is to embrace much that is memorable and potent altogether in poetry.  And if I am right in my claim, some poets at least will have been dangerous enough to suffer a fate worse than neglect – political assassination.  There have been some, since Socrates: for those who insist that we think, and think compassionately, do not always win universal admiration.  I wish I knew all their names to celebrate in a litany: it would be a list worth drawing up.  But I think of one in particular, Federico Garcia Lorca, who – though no political partisan – was killed by partisans in a brutal and cowardly manner in the outskirts of Granada at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.  (Milton, we recall, was not killed, nor even punished, for his partisanship; but I am not sure what conclusion we should draw.)  Garcia Lorca was killed for what he had written although his writings were not partisan; perhaps he was killed because his writings – being what they were – refrained from being partisan; anyway, he was killed for his friends, and for the scalding truth of a poetry that touched nothing more ephemeral than the roots of life.  Listen to this:

There is no one who in giving a kiss

does not feel the smile of faceless people;

and no one who in touching a new born child

forgets the motionless skull of horses.

Because the roses search in the forehead

for a hard landscape of bone

and the hands of man have no other object

than imitating the roots under earth.

As I lose myself in the heart of some children

many times I have lost myself in the sea.

Ignorant of the water I go searching

a death of light which consumes me.

Or this:

But now he sleeps endlessly.

Now the moss and the grass

open with sure fingers

the flower of his skull.

And now his blood comes out singing:

singing along marshes and meadows,

sliding on frozen horns,

faltering soulless in the mist,

stumbling over a thousand hoofs

like a long, dark, sad tongue,

to form a pool of agony

close to the starry Guadalquivir.

V

Poetry is a solitary and private thing most often; though there are other attitudes it can adopt they seem to me less vigorous, less important.  The public voice of poetry is not very different from any other public voice; though it may use words better, it too easily sells its privacy for no notable public gain.  The effect of poetry is very difficult to determine even in oneself: its effect on our knowing is (among other things) to discipline emotion so that we not only feel more deeply but also more truthfully and exactly.  Robert Frost once said that “When the good reader meets the good poem, he suffers an immortal wound and knows he will never recover from it.”  Over this the poet has no direct control when he writes or publishes a particular poem: his concern is for the virtue or value he finds or makes in his poem.  If his political or social sense is strong, and his response to the evils of society acrid, he may write vigorous political verse; but in political verse there is always a drift towards rhetoric, towards generalising, towards the approximations that may move crowds but do not seriously convince the speaker.  When poems become worlds or universes, they speak in positive affirmation out of an order stronger and more enduring than the other less radical though ever-present world of day-to-day, the world of expediency and compromise.  It is not that poems can give an example or lesson: they seldom do.  They enunciate the world of relation and value which we recognise as “our natural home.”  A good poems becomes revolutionary by asserting a world of such simplicity and strength that it accuses and shames the world of power and deliberation.  The truly revolutionary poems spring out of silence and out of darkness; not being altogether of this world they tell us most about this world and about ourselves: as does this poem by Theodore Roethke so far removed from any conceivable world of politics or power.

Elegy for Jane

(my student, thrown by a horse)

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;

And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;

And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,

And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,

Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.

The shade sang with her;

The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;

And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth

Even a father could not find her:

Scraping her cheek against straw

Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,

Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.

The sides of wet stones cannot console me

Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,

My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.

Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:

I, with no rights in this matter,

Neither father nor lover.

We are all – poets particularly – many things, changing from moment to moment; but we have no business abdicating from our responsibility for what we are and what we live among.  Any present is our present; but there are an infinite number of ways (as those who lecture on decision-making may forget) of effecting change, of taking part: even to withdraw, to do nothing is a positive relation.  I do not think we do well to try to be revolutionary: if we do, we shall probably overplay the part and end by not being revolutionary at all.  Cries of disgust and indignation are well enough: they will do no harm; they clear the air and are fun to repeat if well-versed and the malice well-placed.  But poets stand on better ground than that; they work in the field of a liberty which is always astringent and always inventive.  Political revolution brings disorder through temporary abdication of freedom and inventiveness – in the name of freedom.  Poetry is always for order and fluency, but its effect being always oblique is easily disarmed by deliberate effort, becoming nothing.  Even if a poet wants to be revolutionary, he cannot escape the threefold first isolating command of his nature and craft: look clearly, speak straight, write pointedly.  The poet’s absent-mindedness, being the force of revolution set loose in the steady glance of a man like Lorca, is invincible.  The state of the world – even the fate of the world – is really not our business.