What's the use? Writing poetry in wartime.(Critical essay)

In a "Statement of Conscience" in the anthology Poets Against the War, Morton Marcus, a Korean war veteran, offers this apology for the poem he submitted: "The pursuit of this war and our unilateral stance on a number of world issues have left me saddened and depressed.... This [submission] is not a poem. These events, especially the administration's war-mongering, have sucked the poetry out of me" (2003, 122). My own experience of dealing with poetry in the consciousness of the present wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also takes me to a similar brink of artistic depletion. Even as I welcome the general effort of resistance that Poets Against the War represents, as a reader, I feel exhausted by most (though certainly not all) of the poems in the volume. And as a poet, I, like Marcus, suffer a loss of voice, as if the very task of expressing war consciousness has "sucked" the poetry out of me. Like so many poets before me, I wonder whether my aesthetic, or any lyric-based aesthetic, is at all adequate to the task.

I would like to examine this exhaustion and some energetic alternatives to it in order to understand the particular aesthetic problems that surround writing about war or, from a civilian's perspective, writing in response to wartime. To this end, I will discuss the following texts: Marcus own contribution to Poets Against the War, which makes plain the aesthetic challenges a poet faces in writing about war; Muriel Rukeyser's 1949 prose book The Life of Poetry, in which she explores the uses of poetry in a culture dominated by war; and a selection of poems about war and systematized aggression by several different poets--Forche, Blake, James Wright, Yeats, Levertov, and Celan--that illustrate various non-despairing approaches to writing about war as they reveal some of the aesthetic limits encountered in the task.

Intuitively, it seems that "a poetry of witness," deriving its authority from the poet's immediate involvement, should be truthful enough to vitalize the reader. But when I read Poets Against the War, it is not the poems of firsthand testimony that I find most engaging, but those with formal complexity and a dispassion that comes from personal disinterestedness. In fact, the poems of "authentic" witness, many of which are journalistic in tone and stylistically interchangeable, most often sustain the war-dominated imagination they claim to write against. My question is, then, what kind of lyric aesthetic--what kind of first-person authenticity--does writing in wartime require to be both authoritative and truthful? What is it about writing about war that, apparently, tends to reduce poetic singularity to a monotonous flatness, exhausting language itself? And, finally, if poetic language so seldom exceeds the us/them binaries and brutalities of uncritical rhetoric, then what is the use of writing poetry in the consciousness of wartime?

In The Life of Poetry, Muriel Rukeyser helps us think about these questions by speaking very directly about poetry's role in a culture dominated by war and profit. Writing in the utilitarian language of the Progressive Era, in what she elsewhere calls "the first century of world wars" (1994, 211), Rukeyser discusses poetry as a vital national resource that is not only underused but actively resisted in America. Poetry invites a "total imaginative response" (1996, 56) reached through the emotions, yet it is constantly devalued as obscure, elitist, or irrelevant to the worldly business at hand. For Rukeyser, this hostility to poetry betrays a deep-seated fear of feeling, a "complicated and civilized repression of the need for images of the real" (26). The social cost of denying the responsiveness poetry asks of us is "the weakness that leads to mechanical aggression ... turning us inward to devour our own humanity, and outward to sell and kill nature and each other" (41).

When poetry is indeed put to use in the life of the individual and of the nation, the "totalitarian hardening of modern life as it expresses itself in the state" (1996, 26) becomes painfully evident and intolerable. For Rukeyser, change and growth--the nemeses of a totalitarian security state--provide vital energy to both poetry and politics. Speaking in opposition to the New Criticism gaining popularity in the 1940s, an approach she perceived as statically structural, Rukeyser defines poetic form as organic relationship: "Poetry depends on the moving relations within itself. It is an art that lives in time, expressing and evoking the moving relation between the individual consciousness and the world" (xi). The poem effects "a transfer of human energy," an invigoration that Rukeyser explains as "consciousness, the capacity to make change in existing conditions" (xi). The political power of poetry is therefore not in naming or telling, but in rousing our vitality by uniting us with others through "the truth of feeling" (8). Like any kind of truthful art, poetry reawakens and rearranges our connections to life and language, dislodging repressive relations as it inspires new ones.

While poetry alone will not rescue us, Rukeyser believes that "poetry is the type of creation in which we may live and which will save us" (1996, 213) because it joins readers with traditions and sources that are existentially inspiring. Two "useful" literary sources Rukeyser discusses at length are Melville, "the poet of outrage" who deliberately pursues ambiguities, and Whitman, "the poet of possibility" who consciously elaborates dynamic unities (83). These poets are driven toward subtle, complex connectedness not by fear for themselves or contempt for others but by their attraction to the life-giving energy of process and growth. Though positioned differently, both dwell firmly in conflict, and both acknowledge the interplay, rather than the opposition, of good and evil. Neither seeks to "fix" evil, or to "fixate" good. Instead, their work exhibits, in Rukeyser's words, that peace is "not lack of war, but a drive toward unity" (211) with others in the most intense consciousness of the self.

Even as Rukeyser explains poetry's potential usefulness to a nation suffering the despair of a war-dominated mentality and a war-based economy, she also describes the damage done to the artist by the prevailing "corruption of consciousness" (1996, 48) in mid-century American culture. Here, her analysis helps explain why many current war poems fall short of instilling energy in the reader. First, the artist is complicit in culture's imaginative impoverishment when good and evil are seen as oppositions; the poem thus evades truthful complexity and offers a false apocalyptic vision of either "perfection or death" (53), right or wrong, us or them. Second, too often the artist takes the "corruption of consciousness" itself--that is, lovelessness--as her only subject, settling for the artistic goal of replicating that failure of emotional engagement rather than pushing poetry to yield life-giving experiences that counter the habitual negations of feeling in wartime. Finally, another sign of corruption of consciousness in poetry and in culture at large is a tone of contempt; by writing intentionally exclusive poems, the poet privileges one audience over another, pitting the enlightened against the unenlightened, or the more powerful against the less, again sustaining divisions necessary for war. As Rukeyser says, "It is the poem in conflict with itself which is often produced, and which is so depressing to the reader" (54). (1)