![]() Carolyn Forché’s exhaustive anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness is full of such poets as Miklos Radnoti, Robert Desnos, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Paul Celan and Mahmoud Darwish, whose poems shame chicanery, elegize martyrs, bear witness to injustice, speak truth to power and make new.īut poets rarely write with the self-conscious intent to save nations. ![]() Many poets have died and/or suffered severely for their witness to fascism and demagoguery throughout the ages. The poetic nation-saving cure that Milosz espouses originates from a creative process that militates against any form of authoritarian control. Poetry and fiction serve as literary vehicles to transport readers “across” the transom of self to other where one discovers that she is “one, too.” Such transport is human-saving and thereby nation-saving business. And so are we all “one of them, too,” but only if we exercise our imagination in acts that are both artistic and social, both intellectual and compassionate, both judicious and fearless. ![]() “But I felt: you are an I, you are an Elizabeth,/ you are one of them./ Why should you be one, too?” Elizabeth Bishop wrote in the voice of her six-year-old self in her poem In the Waiting Room. The poet finds a way via a transpersonal speaker to cross over from self to neighbor, self to stranger. “The most sublime act is to set another before you,” wrote William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. One of the main things, if not the main thing, that gets lost in demagoguery is a citizen’s recognition of the other as one’s self. Like democracy, poetry is an ongoing experiment that tests its readers ability to “get the meanings of poems” which convey “the main things” (Walt Whitman) in every new age. The first thing democracy requires is also the first thing poetry requires, namely, imagination, without which it’s impossible to envision a state where the genius of its people thrives in both personal and political freedom. It’s no coincidence that the language in two of the most definitive American documents - the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address -flows with a verbal economy that expresses truths Thomas Jefferson called “self-evident.” Poetry is a transformational language with the capacity to issue passports to its readers for entering transcendent realms of awareness where the mind broadens and affections deepen where strange associations make striking new sense, where unlike things coalesce in figurative magic where miniscule details turn into immense particulars where “language means more and sounds better” (Charles Wright) where language finds form and verbal music. I think Milosz and Auden would, given the legacy of poetry’s political efficacy and witness throughout history, probably agree more than disagree about poetry’s truthful double role as both a redemptive and elegiac literary force. So, the best poets in every nation divine the double nature of truth in memorable language, capturing the alloyed relations between joy and sorrow, victory and defeat, power and helplessness. But their contradictions often contain paradoxes that betray the rich complexities of human experience, which Whitman embraced boldly, declaring at the end of his poem Song of Myself, “Do I contradict myself, then I contradict myself, I contain multitudes.” Poets are famous for contradicting themselves, especially Walt Whitman. Yeats, namely, that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Auden, a dual citizen of both the United States and England and cultural spokesman of his age, made in his 1938 elegy for W.B. In acknowledging poetry as an art with the power to save nations, Milosz contradicts the claim that his fellow poet W. citizen in 1970, published a poem titled Dedication in 1946 in which he wrote, “What is poetry which does not save Nations or people?/ A Contrivance with official lies.” C zeslaw Milosz, the 20th-century Polish poet and Nobel laureate who became a U.S.
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