Here are a few random observations relating in some way to poetry
and politics, which I offer in hope of provoking some further
discussion of this topic.  I don't necessarily endorse the following
quoted ideas myself.

   "Twelve years ago," wrote Yeats in his preface to the 1936
edition of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, "Oliver Gogarty was
captured by his enemies, imprisoned in a deserted house on the
edge of the Liffey with every prospect of death.  Pleading a natural
necessity he got into the garden, plunged under a shower of revolver
bullets and as he swam the ice-cold December stream promised it,
should it land him in safety, two swans.  I was present when he
fulfilled that vow." Compared to that, the political activity of
even the most activist poets today is a pinkie lifting, cucumber
sandwich nibbling tea party.  And yet the poetry of this stately,
plump urban guerilla is about as apolitical as you can get.  Can
anything be learned from this?

   Yeats also wrote in that essay, "No matter how great a reformer's
energy a still greater is required to face, all activities expended
n vain, the unreformed."

   And also:  "If war is necessary, or necessary in our time and
place, it is best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of
fever, remembering our comfort at midnight when our temperature
fell, or as we forget the worst moments of more painful disease."

   Can anyone produce an example of a really effective political
poem?  Marvell's Horatian Ode is the best poem about politics that I
know, but is a poem about politics the same as a political poem?

   I some time ago read some published correspondence between T. S.
Eliot and Hugh Macdiarmid.  I no longer have the text before me, but
my memory is that the correspondence was quite cordial, with
Macdiarmid showing courteous deference to Eliot, who was helping
Macdiarmid to get some of his work published.  This was in spite of
the fact that Macdiarmid's politics were extreme leftist, and
Eliot's beyond extreme right.  Today, most poets are on the left,
and if there are any right wing poets I have a hard time imagining
them and the leftist poets even being on speaking terms.  Is this a
Good Thing or a Bad Thing?  Do any of you reading this know
personally any poets of pronouncedly conservative political views?
Do you think their poetry is good?  If so, would you feel any qualms
about helping to propagate it?

   George Bernard Shaw said that all great truths begin as
blasphemies.  History proves the accuracy of Shaw's statement:  the
idea that all of us are born equal, that we should have freedom of
religion, that citizens all have the right to equality before the
law regardless of social class, that everyone should have a valid
vote in a democracy -- all these ideas were at one time blasphemous.
In fact, there were times and places when one could be killed for
advocating them.  Today, we have recognized these blasphemies as
great truths and can look back with smug condescension on our
unenlightened ancestors.  But our smugness ought to evaporate when
we consider that the inevitable corollary to Shaw's statement is
that at least some things which today we consider blasphemies will
some day be recognized as great truths.  Since poets often boast
themselves as being in the advance guard of truth-seekers, perhaps
this means it is the political duty of poets to champion
blasphemies, in order to begin the process by which our far
descendents will recognize them as great truths.  Of course this has
certain disadvantages:  everyone will hate you, your life may be
ruined or prematurely ended, and you may turn out to have been
exalting an idea which is so appalling that it really deserves to be
considered blasphemous.  No one ever said the job was easy.

   Finally, to give a poet the last word:

        To the States

     To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States,
        Resist much, obey little,
     Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
     Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever
       afterward resumes its liberty.

                                        -- Walt Whitman

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