Many thanks to Daniel Bouchard (knows Eddie, I think, hi!) for useful
comments, especially a development of a point I inadequately made. The reason
for creating vividness about political issues via poetry is certainly to have
a political effect through the audience. Another motive for writing political
poetry is just shame if you don't. Supposing in 200 years we have really
fucked up the earth and there are a few survivors who gain access to some old
library: what did the poets of the day say about it all? Oh, I see, they
mostly worried about syntax or signifiers. Or supposing you're talking to a
literate famine victim and in the desert there reveal you're a poet. "What do
you write about?" he/she croaks. "Do you ever think about us?" "Well, it
wouldn't do any good -- we're more looking at the impossibility of having a
political effect, you see, how that's tied up with a need for new syntax."
The sand covers this conversation.

My only criticism of the Auden citation is that its central metaphor, the
"valley of its making", is too confining: it doesn't sufficiently capture the
interaction between poet's real world-poet's real life-poet's persona-text-
reader as "reader"-reader's real life-reader's real world: without a flash
transmitted across all these fields there is no true temporality in a poem.
That's to say, the poem isn't yet a work of art, only an immanent one.

Daniel asks for the historical perspective I hint at but that's a tremendous
task. Try the Western European tradition alone (and include mediation between
the "gods", major battles, and the civic consciousness as a political action).
Then we'd have at the very least:

Hesiod, Homer, the major Greek playwrights, Vergil, Ovid, Beowulf, Battle of
Maldon, Dante and Florence, the Arthurian cycle in Britain and France, Eleanor
of Acquitaine and the courtly tradition, the medieval churchy poets, the
troubadours and affirmation of the castle court, Chaucer and his patrons,
Petrarch:Boccaccio and the tradition of learning tuning up to confront the
medieval church, Henry VII and the humanist writers, the Tudor poets sucking
up to Henry VIII and the humanists on his side against Rome, Rabelais on
François Ier's side against the Gallocentric church, Marie de France backing
him up, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists in the thick of it, the
17th c Royalist poets, the Cromwellians including Milton and Marvell, Molière
and the court of the Sun King, Racine and the Jansenists, proto feminists like
the Duchess of Newcastle, Pope and the grandee neo-classicism, Defoe and the
free trade movement, Aphra Benn (not a poet) and slavery ... phew! I haven't
even got to the romantics, to all those poets since who have not retreated.
I mean where do you want me to stop in this utterly superficial skating over
what has always been present through poetry's history?

Then, the Sumerian Inanna, the Bible, Russia since the 19th century -- hardly
a great man or woman poet able to stay clear. The Mahabarata, the Ramayana,
the involvement of ancient Chinese poetry as participants and critics of court
life. Indian chants as elements in social cohesion and a calling down of the
gods. The role played by brave African poets as nations disintegrate and
cruel dictatorships threaten them. How puny is my list!

And when you think, say, of Chaucer's "Boke of the Duchesse" it's so easy to
say -- look at all that creeping round John of Gaunt. But the poem stays as a
monument to grief and to consolation; it could not have come into being
without the politico/social situation that provided its tensions, because it's
strange, spooky solemnity depends upon a specific origin in late medieval
society.

When you start listing such things the heart quails at human foolishness, to
be waving little flags in that great wind of historical time, thinking that we
alone have become uniquely powerless, that we alone have the right, repeat
right, to stop writing political poetry. As if we actually do simply stop
living our lives because of that thought or cease being fully human.

Oh gods! I don't believe. But yet I call upon thee! Punish this hubris!

Well, may a thunderbolt strike our TV in the middle of "The Money Programme".

An utterly self-demoralised Doug




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