America Needs a Poet Laureate, Maybe

By LANCE MORROW

Theoretically, all of the pinwheeling spectacle and clamor of American politics ought to be raw material for an art form a little more complex and reflective than television. Mao Tse-tung, for example, interminably turned his Chinese struggles into poetry. But American politics and poetry have never been able to form a lasting relationship. Oh, Ted Kennedy quotes the passage of Tennyson that his brothers admired, and Eugene McCarthy likes to write verse, often of the pointlessly enigmatic kind ("I am alone/ In the land of the aardvarks . . ."). John Kennedy had Robert Frost read at his Inauguration, and Jimmy Carter asked similar service of James Dickey. But, on the whole, Americans have preferred Plato's approach: he banned poets from his Republic.

For many reasons, that may be just as well. Poetry that labors as power's mythmaking flunky is depressing and possibly dangerous. Still, a ritual like the American presidential campaign might be more fun, and certainly more preposterous, with a ceremonial conversion into verse. What if Americans followed the British example, if they had a laureate to bang out clerihews and odes--a little something to mark a President's ten-point jump in the polls, a sonnet for renomination, and so on?

The British have aged and mellowed their institution of poet laureate for three centuries. Some who read the effusions of the present laureate, Sir John Betjeman, think that the process is better described as decay. Two weeks agd, when the Queen Mother turned 80, Sir John released a poem of celebration: "We are your people,/ Millions of us greet you/ On this your birthday/ Mother of our Queen." This defiantly wooden psalming was merely average Betjeman. Years ago, the death of King George V inspired the young Betjeman to a soaring metaphysical conception: "Spirits of well-shot woodcock, partridge, snipe/ Flutter and bear him up the Norfolk sky." Over the years, Sir John's verses have aroused almost demented indignation, but the laureate amiably dismisses his critics as "silly asses who don't understand poetry." He is partly right. Most of it, almost by some subconscious design, would make Hallmark cards sound like John Donne.

Excellent poets (Dryden, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Masefield), as well as bad ones, have served as poet laureate, yet the job has virtually never called forth any verse more memorable than the sort of decoratively obsequious doggerel that a well-educated butler might compose. The most enduringly dreadful lines were penned by the spellbound and earnest Alfred Austin in the late 19th century. Austin, author of "Leszko the Bastard, a Tale of Polish Grief," auditioned for the laureate's post with a marvelously stupefying couplet on the illness of the Prince of Wales: "Across the wires the electric message came:/ 'He is no better. He is much the same.' " Occasional verse itself, poetry on demand, almost always leads to things like that. It would be difficult for any poet, laureate or not, to surpass the Englishman Samuel Carter's "Paean" to the London sewer system: "Magnificent, too, is the system of drains,/ Exceeding the far-spoken wonders of old/ . . . Well did the ancient proverb lay down this important text/ That cleanliness for human weal to godliness is next."

America has never tried a national poet laureate, mostly because the thing smacks of titles, of poets groveling before lords and trying to dress up hereditary idiots in velvet prosody. But perhaps the U.S. should reconsider. At least 17 states now have poets laureate. Most of them are regional talents, often amateurs; a few, like Richard Eberhardt (New Hampshire) and Gwendolyn Brooks (Illinois), are distinguished poets.

Poetry has long been regarded in America as unprofitable and sissy. A laureateship would be a way to give the craft some livelier hormones. It might also serve to draw poetry more into public realms, out of the excruciating and quivering privacy in which it now abides. To avoid the English laureate's hobbling obsequiousness, an American laureate would have to be guaranteed his independence. But beware of a lifelong appointment, like one to the Supreme Court; it might make a poet fatuous, "official" and eventually senile.

Why not have a candidate for poet laureate run on every presidential ticket? The poet would be granted a guarantee of immunity, like Lear's Fool, to criticize Government policy as he wishes. The plan might open up an interesting game: select the poet who goes with the President. Thus James Dickey probably would belong more with Lyndon Johnson than with Carter; Rod McKuen might be Carter's bard (although the President's favorite poet, officially, is Dylan Thomas). Ronald Reagan's lyricist might have been the late Oscar Hammerstein II; he would have to pick another. Eisenhower's? Edgar Guest. J.F.K.'s? Another lyricist, perhaps: Alan Jay Lerner. Harry Truman's? Edgar Lee Masters. Richard Nixon's? Imamu Baraka (formerly Leroi Jones). Eugene McCarthy's? Eugene McCarthy.

Americans might even honor the exuberant, slightly bizarre poetry of their commercial muse. Two or three generations ago, the national laureate might have been the anonymous bard who wrote the Burma Shave roadside quatrains ("In this vale/ Of toil and sin/ Your head grows bald/ But not your chin/ Burma Shave.") The beer commercial ("You've danced all day on a pool of fire," or some such: "Now Comes Miller Time!") has invented a sort of macho haiku that might turn into a national verse form.

Would the idea of a national laureate savor too much of those Graustarkian palace uniforms that Richard Nixon once ordered to dress up the White House guards? Probably. But if Jimmy Carter had had a troubadour to sing his occasions, his Sir John might, for better or worse, have erupted in celebration last week:

He bested Ted as once he beat the killer rabbit, down in the chigger latitudes. He smiles (force of habit) and meditates upon the Garden, like some mildly triumphant parson. Nearly four years pass behind his eyes: golden days, cardigan days, Billy Beer days; the abrupt surprise of Russian nastiness and the South Bronx ghettos. His reveries sweep to Jordan 's squirted Amarettos (a fancy drink for a good ole boy) and Vance and Lance, and jogger's tibia and all the money Billy made for being friends with Libya. But nothing can efface the joy of this renomination. (Well, almost nothing: here comes the killer rabbit again, rising from the congregation . )

--By Lance Morrow

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