It's unrealistic to expect a poet to respond to negative criticism with a high minded objectivity and so on. Why should they? Criticizing poems by people who post here is a bad idea. Always leads to awfulness.
Auden's "The Shield of Achilles" is an effective political poem. Fewer hard feelings and so on if (because one wants criticism) the poems of the dead are discussed.
Here it is. Hell, just reading it is worth an infinity of critical discussions of the internet ilk.
he Shield of Achilles
W. H. Auden
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She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
David Latane <[log in to unmask]> wrote: I agree that many of the most profoundly political
poems don't have overt political agendas, or employ
persuasive rhetoric. At least that's how I taught the
otherwise namby-pampy bits of Lyrical Ballads this
morning.
But to go back to the original question, I would argue
that Tony Harrison's "A Cold Coming," published 18
March 1991 in The Guardian is an effective political
poem, capable of persuading readers of that newspaper
who might have been leaning towards war justification
(all the Adolph stuff), or who were beings seduced by
the Scud Stud on CNN and the techno-cool that the 1st
Gulf War was an evil.
David Latane
http://www.standmagazine.org (Stand Magazine, Leeds)
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