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Cover
story The
nation yearns for poetry in politics
By MICHAEL J. FARRELL
"The rock cries out today, you may stand upon me, but do not hide
your face." The winged words of Maya Angelou created a throb of exaltation
across the land during the inauguration of President William Jefferson Clinton
in January 1993:
Lift up your hearts Each new hour holds new chances For
new beginnings. Do not be wedded forever To fear, yoked eternally To
brutishness...
Then Maya Angelou went back to her quiet life, Clinton went back
to politics, and the Muse flew frantically in search of a fix over the big,
bustling, rich, poor, mean, generous but not very poetic United States.
For a country that has everything, this one has strikingly little
lyricism. A soaring word like "spirit" falls with a dull thud out on the
campaign trail. A poetic concept such as freedom is recited with most intensity
by militia members, gravel in their voices, in places with names like Ruby
Ridge. There is something very democratic about this, a leveling, as there is
about the U.S. poet laureate, a new one every year, or 30 in 30 years, marking
each one with the stamp of mediocrity rather than issuing an odd one with the
lifetime challenge to towering genius.
The trouble with poetry is real life, which has no time to slow
down for verse. Pity the campaign manager who suggests, "It's the poetry,
stupid." He would be out of there faster than the recent Dick Morris. "We're
going to give them (that's us) a tax cut," Bob Dole says. We're going to save
Medicare, Bill Clinton responds. So far, so good. They're supposed to promise
the sun and moon. On the heels of their hefty promises come the "negative
attacks" and "character issues," politics as we know it, all the way to the
bottom.
Bringing poetry to bear on politics seems the most hopeless tack
on earth, and the fact that they ever run into each other in the public square
is a small miracle that -- who knows? -- could lead to a bigger one.
The only other occasion on which poetry got such a high hearing as
Angelou's was when Robert Frost recited a poem at John F. Kennedy's
inauguration. Apart from the magic of lost Camelot and our nostalgia for the
New Frontier and other such mythologies, it seems fair to say that poetry
became Kennedy, whatever else one may say about him, better than any recent
U.S. president. He invited the Muse to the White House for various glittering
occasions. Some might say this was his wife, Jackie, having an eye and ear for
style, but yet it was the Kennedy White House.
Kennedy went farther and took poetry on the road. On Oct. 26,
1963, he traveled to Amherst College to pay tribute to Frost. In the USA,
Kennedy said then, "our heroes have customarily run to men of large
accomplishments. But today this college and country honors a man whose
contribution was not to our size but to our spirit, not to our political
beliefs but to our insight, not to our self-esteem but to our
self-comprehension."
This speech went beyond tribute to Frost, to the bright,
insubstantial but indispensable role of poetry, by whatever name, in the lives
of people: "Our national strength matters, but the spirit that informs and
controls our strength matters just as much." This sounds abstract, but Kennedy
went on to spell it out: "When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry
reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern,
poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power
corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must
serve as the touchstone of our judgment."
Perhaps it is unfair to ask what the reaction would be were
Clinton or Dole to take one evening out of their two-year-long, or longer,
campaigns to give a speech like that. It would be a sensation. But it could
never happen. Never mind that they could find speech writers, as Kennedy
probably did, to put the fine words together; such a speech would be against
their grain, would not express who they are. And that in turn raises questions
about the kinds of leaders we want and get.
Yet we do want poetry by whatever name. In this year's
pre-election doldrums the country cries out for a candidate or even a single
speech that will set on fire our personal and communal aspirations, that
instead of offering us tax bribes and other political pap, challenges us to
greatness, or, short of that, coaxes us to hope.
A few days after JFK's speech, the New York Post ran an
editorial that began: "Long after President Kennedy's speeches on Berlin,
taxes, Laos and the like have been forgotten, his address at Amherst College
honoring Robert Frost and through him all poets and artists will be read,
studied and admired."
No subsequent politician learned the lesson from this: that people
care; that it might even pay off politically. The Post editorial ended:
"If the precepts of this noble speech become the guidelines of American
society, we are indeed entering not the decline, as some pessimists proclaim,
but the golden age of American civilization."
This promise, sadly, was soon cut short, and a different lesson
learned. A few days later, John Kennedy was killed.
In a brief editorial that won a Pulitzer prize in 1923, William
Allen White encouraged "an anxious friend" not to fear because "This nation
will survive, this state will prosper, the orderly business of life will go
forward if only men can speak in whatever way given to them to utter what their
hearts hold." It is probably putting too great an onus on fate to suggest it
prompted Kennedy, in one of his last speeches, to sing out so clearly what his
heart held. Yet this year's electorate surely hankers to hear a similar,
"final," go-for-broke declaration from the candidates. What a wonder such
speeches could be!
In a mild irony, in this year when politics are more prosaic than
usual, poetry seems to be enjoying a little renaissance. For the second year in
a row, a poet won the Nobel prize for literature. Many new poets are finding
ever more willing publishers, an indication that there are interested readers
in the land.
Religious poetry is part of this upsurge. A headline in
ReligionBookLine, which keeps an eye on trends, announces, "As poetry
enjoys a revival, spiritually themed poetry finds eager readers." One could
argue that the spirituality and poetry overlap before flying off to the same
high destiny.
What gradually emerges, however, is the reluctance of nearly
everyone to define poetry. "We'll know it when we see it," seems a reasonable
response. But if we're expecting poetry from politicians, we're presumably
prepared to settle for less than the sublime: not so much iambic pentameter as
an attitude to life. Bob Dole is no Robert Frost, but no one has a right to
rule out the darndest, daringest Dole imagination waiting to find its
expression.
Said Kennedy at Amherst: "If sometimes our great artists have been
the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their
concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, make them aware that
our nation falls short of its highest potential."
The poet as critic follows a hallowed tradition. The old Soviet
Union, even at its most dire, let some poets at least get away with sentiments
for which other citizens would soon be languishing in Siberia. In ancient
Ireland, the file, who was poet and philosopher, sat next to the king
and had permission, at least on good days, to tell it like it was.
Wiser heads, in other words, seemed to suspect that there was a
power in poetry that ordinary politics could never match. "Let others write a
nation's laws if I could write its songs," Thomas Jefferson supposedly said.
The songs go deeper, have more power to persuade.
Thus poet and novelist Fred Chappell, interviewed by Publishers
Weekly (Sept. 30), beguilingly describes poetry as "the noblest secular
endeavor that the human mind undertakes. If you get up in the morning and write
poetry, your IQ rises 15 points for the whole day. Get up in the morning and
write fiction, your mind slows down a little bit."
Sure, it's a biased opinion, but many yearning citizens would leap
to endorse it.
"Beauty will save the world," Dostoevsky once said. It is a
sentiment old as the ancient Greeks. Alexander Solzhenitsyn took it as his text
for his Nobel lecture in 1970, one the Soviet Union did not allow him to
deliver. He wrote of the roles of truth, goodness and beauty in making our
lives whole and happy. But, he goes on, if "the too blatant, too direct stems
of truth and goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through -- then
perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of beauty will push
through and soar to that very same place, and in so doing will fulfill the work
of all three."
If that happens, of course, it won't be as neat as Solzhenitsyn
wrote it. This is earth and life is messy. A poem would be a pitiful political
platform in 1996, because it could never offer the specifics that ensure a
decent life and the leisure to listen to poetry in the first place -- though in
this vagueness the poem would be in good company with the politicians.
"All you are doing and saying is to America dangled mirages," Walt
Whitman wrote in an 1860 poem titled "To A President." Time passes but little
changes. Yes, life is messy. But people do want, in their deep internal selves,
the poem or the vision or the spirit of the blinding or consoling insight, and
what so many hearts are so eager for must be capable of being achieved somehow,
sooner or later. It's only natural.
Michael Farrell is NCR's senior editor.
National Catholic Reporter, November 1,
1996
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