Poetry and Politics

By Roger Rosenblatt

-- MIKHAIL LERMONTOV

It seemed odd, on first hearing of it, that Nicholas Daniloff would quote lines of poetry to mark his release from Soviet imprisonment. Here was an incident that filled the news for a month, that brought the world's two titans into open confrontation, that in the end, perhaps, prodded them to agree on the presummit summit. Yet to cap off those momentous political events, Daniloff, the center of the storm, reached back into art for a poem by Mikhail Lermontov written almost 150 years ago for another world and circumstance. Grant that it was more diplomatic of Daniloff to quote Lermontov's exasperation with Mother Russia than to express his own. Still, it is curious that one would articulate feelings about so immediate and politically charged an event by using a form associated with indirection and repose.

Not that poets themselves have ever avoided politics as subject matter. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, all found ways to hail or rage against kings and governments through their work. Yeats, unpolitical as anyone could look in his fluffy neckties, wrote stinging political lines. As did Robert Lowell. As does Seamus Heaney. W.H. Auden's September 1, 1939 is a beautiful muddle of a poem on Europe in the shadow of war. Bertolt Brecht's To Posterity, about Germany under the Nazis, is clear as a bell:

Ah, what an age it is

When to speak of trees is almost a crime

For it is a kind of silence against injustice.

For their part, political leaders have courted poets, supported poets, quoted poets. Some have even been poets. Henry VIII, who liked to write verse when he wasn't making life brutish or short for his wives. Chairman Mao, who, when visited by the muse, commanded the largest audience for poetry in history. Poet Leopold Senghor, former President of Senegal. Poet Jose Sarney, current President of Brazil. If political leaders happen not to be poets, they can always seek one's company, so that he may write them into immortality or simply decorate a hard, unlyrical business. John Kennedy had genuine affection for the work of Robert Frost, but the poet's presence at Kennedy's Inaugural -- the poem flapping in the wintry wind -- also served to give a magic power to the occasion, like the blessing of the gods.

What clashes in the connection of poetry and politics is that on the surface, the two forms of expression seem antipodal not only in tone and structure but in the pictures of mind they convey. The poet is a vague and hazy animal, the politician hunched forward like a cat. What one would devour, the other would toy with in the air, angling the world in his paws so as to know not the world itself but the light-play on the world.

And yet, as the Daniloff incident suggests, these two sets of mind have a way of coming together in the strangest places, which would indicate that poetry and politics have basic things in common. One is the need to create a sense of urgency. Poets and politicians are alike in the frantic force of their opinions. When either speaks his mind, he is like the Ancient Mariner; he seizes the public by the collar as if to say: Accept my perspective and be converted.

Then, too, there are similar passions in poetry and politics. However dignified poetry or politics may appear, there is something sublimely irrational at their centers. Both appeal to the irrational as well, to the zealot in you stirring in the ice of your calm and stately nature. Zealots themselves, they seem to need to win something, to force a climax almost sexual.

At the same time, both also depend on the continuity of living, on the fact that no matter how heated the single moment, the realization of that moment is of necessity incomplete. The art of politics seems to dance between acting as if every issue were the end of the earth and simultaneously acknowledging that tomorrow will hold up a dozen fresh crucial issues. Poems imply this same incompleteness. Unlike prose, the place that a poem aims and arrives at is less important to the success of the poem than the ideas and images it uses to make the journey. By those ideas and images the poet holds the reader to the process, by which he suggests that the poem pauses more than finishes and that the end is somewhere in the middle.

Poems also create their own state of mind, and politics does that as well. Paul Valery defined a poem as a "kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words." The politician produces the political state of mind by means of words. Each does an act of hypnosis by persuading its audience that reality is the world that the poet or politician has constructed for them. In that, the two are equally imaginative. The world they create is an unreality. Yet that world must be grounded in reality, in facts -- the real toads in imaginary gardens that Marianne Moore prescribed for poetry -- or else the audience will not believe it.

Still, if poetry and politics are bedfellows in certain ways, the bed is rarely comfortable. Poetry has none of the active power that politics has. It can protest or commemorate a war but cannot cause one. Assessing the poet's responsibility in the world, Allen Tate derided the romantic notion that if poets "behaved differently . . . the international political order itself would not have been in jeopardy and we should not perhaps be at international loggerheads today." Poets do not have that sort of influence, and undoubtedly would abuse it if they did.

The power poetry does have, however, is staying power. It outlives politics mainly because the language of poets outlives the language of politicians -- so effectively that Daniloff could recite Lermontov to the world last week, and the world could appear to have been waiting for those words. That eternity of language, reaching as far back as forward, is what politicians fear most about poetry, when they do fear it, and it can make a terrible enemy. Politics touches some people at particular times. Poetry calls to all people at all times. By its existence it demands generosity and expansiveness. "When power narrows the areas of man's concern," said Kennedy, "poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses." Last week Lermontov, dead 145 years, mocked all the prisons and praised all the skies.