Posted on 10/05/2001 2:27:09 PM PDT by TLBSHOW
Poetry makes nothing happen, wrote W.H. Auden. Yet when disaster struck, we discovered we were a country again, and looked to poets to remind us of our shared humanity. In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane commemorated the man and woman who jumped hand-in-hand to their deaths from the World Trade Center with Philip Larkins What will survive of us is love. In The New York Times, Andrew Sullivan quoted from another Larkin poem, Days, to begin his essay on what was perhaps the most stunning day of our lifetimes:
What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days?
Larkin, a reclusive and fiercely unfashionable British poet whose work resonates deeply with readers, was referred to only a few times. The most frequently cited poets were W.B. Yeats and Auden. Two of Yeats poems were ubiquitous: The Second Coming (1921) a vision of horror that summed up much of the 20th century and already has a grip on this one, and Easter 1916 (All changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born). In the meantime, Audens September 1, 1939, which was written in New York on the eve of World War II, popped up all over the Internet like an electronic letter in a bottle. Despite being more than 60 years old, the poem almost seemed to have been composed for the occasion, and its most famous line, We must love one another or die, became famous all over again.
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odor of death Offends the September night.
Other Auden poems made the rounds too. Most pertinent, perhaps, was a sinister little lyric from 1938, Gare du Midi, about a man who gets off a train clutching a little case and walks out briskly to infect a city/Whose terrible future may have just arrived. In retrospect, the poem reads like a prophecy of germ warfare, and may have been intended as such. Significantly, the person quoting it (in the Washington Post), was former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen.
It was inevitable that poetry would be bandied about after a tragedy of this size, if only because journalists and politicians need something solemn and pithy to cite. Expressing something important about life in a small number of extremely memorable words is, after all, the poets art. But by the time I heard a sentence written by Stephen Spender emerge (uncredited) from the mouth of Governor George Pataki of New York, I knew something noteworthy was going on. Why Spender, a now largely forgotten British writer whose heyday was in the 1930s? Why poets from England and Ireland rather than America? After all, Americans wrote some of the greatest poetry of the last century.
One possible answer lies in the extreme aestheticism of much modern American verse. As Audens literary executor, Edward Mendelson, once told me, No one was ever made uncomfortable about their moral life after reading Wallace Stevens, but you can feel very uncomfortable after reading Auden. Then theres the fact that 20th-century Americans, poets included, had the luxury of viewing history from a distance, or of entering it as saviors. National tragedy hasnt been our daily bread. Vietnam and the social upheavals of the 1960s temporarily dragged history into our living rooms, but since the 1980s its absence has been close to total. We fight a war, and one soldier breaks a leg: Thats about the extent of our casualty list. Before long, we start forgetting where or why the war was fought. Its no wonder most of our poets havent been preoccupied with history: Theres been so little to go around. As a result, theyve been free to cultivate the gardens inside their own heads. Many strange and beautiful plants have resulted, but grand statements about the world have been scarce.
Yet grand statements are what you want in a poem when terrorists have just eviscerated the World Trade Center along with thousands of its occupants. You dont want impressionistic daubs and creative-writing prettiness; you need a point of view. As Edward Rothstein wrote in The New York Times, This destruction seems to cry out for a transcendent ethical perspective. The literati would normally be uncomfortable with such an uncompromising sentiment, but for a moment they werent so sure. What will survive of us is love. We must love one another or die what are those if not transcendent ethical perspectives?
Admittedly, they are also somewhat vague. But whats striking about many of the lines people have been quoting is their precision, their attempt to nail down a specific universal truth. I and the public know/What all schoolchildren learn,/ Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return, Auden wrote. You dont come across lines like that anymore in poems. For one thing, we dont believe in evil unless its our own, in which case we believe in it in spades and weve abandoned the idea of the public in favor of multiple communities with special needs. Even the word schoolchildren, used as a blanket term, is enough to get the professionally sensitive tut-tutting. Are we talking about underprivileged schoolchildren? Disabled schoolchildren? From single-parent households? Etc. If few contemporary poets now bother to say something that feels universally true, this is one reason why: Theyre afraid of being slowly tortured to death by a nationwide cadre of nitpickers.
Most of the time, poets dont even try to address society as a whole. (They abandoned all that to protest singers and rock stars years ago.) Our brand-new literary problem how do I write about we when Im always thinking about me? is strangely analogous to the difficulty faced by people who normally think in terms of specific groups when they are suddenly forced to consider the entire country. Committed to the idea that all cultures are equal, theyve avoided passing judgment on anything except the various sins of the West. So when a rabid minority a murderous sect wrapped in the flag of Islam starts blowing bits of the West up, a lot of people dont know how to react. You could sense the confusion in an impromptu poem written by Russell Leong shortly after the attack, and later quoted approvingly in the L.A. Times:
Its another city today They say. HE, or SHE, or THEY may be praying or plotting In a mosque. In a temple. In a church. In a truck, car or plane.
I sincerely doubt whether the poet really believes that the terrorists are as likely to be women as men or that Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) supporters could be hiding out at the local rectory, but in the interest of fairness he feels obliged to make the case anyway. If it wasnt so sad, it would almost be funny. Perhaps the Times should have quoted from the new Dylan instead:
George Lewes told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew,
You cant open up your mind, boys, to every conceivable point of view.
The least we can ask of writers is that they be honest. Its well known that Auden eventually disowned September 1, 1939 on the grounds that it was infected with an incurable dishonesty, but the poets tortured attempt to tell the truth about his moment in history is what speaks to us in ours. Perhaps the real reason weve turned to poets like Auden, Yeats and Larkin is that their work epitomizes whats best in our society, and despite its flaws, we feel its a society worth defending.
It's called "Two Towers"
Shattered in the blue dawn's early gleaming,
Steel and glass fall down one fateful morn.
Twin Towers burn in fires of hateful dreaming.
We wake to pyres of nightmares newly born.
Now, rebel clerics fan the flaming rabble.
And yet, the Bell of Hope chimes. God, we hear it
Above the evil death-cult's towering babble,
Ringing to our heart, our mind, our spirit.
So to our Towers our streaming faces turn,
Still standing on our bannered City's Hill--
As Root and Branch our enemies can't burn--
As Pen and Sword: the allies of our will.
For God and Country stand our righteous Towers.
The Two are not Jihad's. The Two are ours.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.