The poets fly like doves

Mankind, poet Kenneth Rexroth once said, “thrives where angels die of ecstasy and pigs die of disgust.”

Thus the poetry of war -- pro and anti.

Today, the world is awash in the latter. Antiwar poetry anthologies from the U.S., Canada and Britain are spreading across the Internet. Readings are scheduled across the country and across from the White House. Forty poets and artists, including the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott and former U.S. poet laureate Richard Wilbur, have signed a statement opposing war with Iraq. Andrew Motion, the current British poet laureate, and his American counterpart, Billy Collins, have made their opposition public.

In fact, Collins was to have participated in a very different White House event today. First Lady Laura Bush had invited a group of poets to celebrate the work of Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes and Emily Dickinson and then to watch Vice President Dick Cheney swear in their colleague Dana Gioia as new head of the National Endowment for the Arts.

When one of the invited poets, Sam Hamill -- who edits the Copper Canyon Press -- declined his invitation and began instead to assemble a collection of antiwar verse to be presented to Bush, she canceled the event.

“If political protest is urgent, I don’t think it needs to wait for an appropriate scene and setting and should be as disruptive as it wants to be,” Collins said by e-mail. “I have tried to keep the West Wing and the East Wing of the White House as separate as possible because I support what Mrs. Bush has done for the causes of literacy and reading. But as this country is being pushed into a violent confrontation, I find it increasingly difficult to maintain that separation.”

Hamill’s online anthology, meanwhile, has grown to include thousands of poems.

What are readers and listeners to make of this sudden poetic torrent?

First, of course, there is the authority of the poem itself: Does it through eloquence, artistry and authenticity convince or move us?

And then, inescapably in public interventions such as these, there is the question of the poets’ own authority.

To this day, our archetypal antiwar poets are the Englishmen Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Their verse had -- and retains -- a special power because both began World War I as poetic propagandists for their country’s cause and both volunteered and served heroically as officers in the trenches. Both were treated for shell shock, returned to the fighting and ended the war as pacifists.

To an extent now long forgotten, much of the literary intelligentsia throughout pre-1914 Europe had assimilated a romantic militarism nakedly summarized by Helmut von Moltke, the chief of the Imperial German General Staff: “Without war, the nation has nothing to offer its people but materialism.”

That great lie was the subtext of the verse Owen and Sassoon made from their earliest wartime experiences. Sassoon began by celebrating the Christlike sacrifice of common soldiers in his first collection, “The Old Huntsman.” A year later, when he published the poems in “Counter-Attack,” he would wonder bitterly:

*

Does it matter?--losing your

legs?--

For people will always be kind,

And you need not show that you

mind

When the others come in after

hunting

To gobble muffins and eggs.

*

Owen, who won the Military Cross for Gallantry and was killed one week before the Armistice at age 25, began the war by writing:

Red lips are not so red

As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

Kindness of wooed and wooer

Seems shame to their love pure.

*

A little more than a year later, he would begin “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which is perhaps the most famous of English-language antiwar poems:

*

Bent double, like old beggars

under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like

hags, we cursed through sludge

*

And would end it:

*

My friend, you would not tell

with such high zest

To children ardent for some

desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum

est

Pro patria mori.

*

Sassoon saw his dead comrade’s poems through to publication and, to the end of his long life, shared Owen’s conviction that it was neither sweet nor proper to die for one’s country. He chose his great friend’s epitaph: “Courage was mine, and I had mystery; Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery.”

When Sassoon died in 1967, a friend recalled these words of his: “War is hell, and those who institute it are criminals. Were there even anything to say for it, it should not be said; for its spiritual disasters far outweigh any of its advantages.”

Some of the finest American antiwar verse of the 20th century was written by poets whose particular authority was born of their conscientious objection to World War II. Rexroth, William Everson -- who was interned in Oregon -- and Kenneth Patchen, who believed he shared his time with “beings so hideous that the air weeps blood.”

Their moral courage and the genuine risks they accepted were different in kind than those of Owen and Sassoon, but conferred their own authority. So, too, during the awful century just past did a poet’s acceptance of the simple duty to witness firsthand.

Anna Akhmatova -- who during the Yezhov terror spent 17 months outside the Leningrad prison hoping to pry from the Soviet authorities some news of her arrested son -- begins her great “Requiem” sequence with this declaration:

*

No foreign sky protected me,

no stranger’s wing shielded my

face.

I stand as witness to the

common lot,

survivor of that time, that place.

*

When the first lady decided to cancel today’s poetry readings, she came in for pointed criticism.

“Canceling the event was the cowardly thing to do,” said Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic. “It’s the role of the poets to speak truth to power and the role of power to welcome truth.”

Undeniably so.

But not all poetry spoken in protest is either good or true. Much of what now is being written and declaimed in Europe, for example, is animated by a hysterical anti-Americanism -- as in the case of daffy old Harold Pinter -- or deformed by outright anti-Semitism masquerading as concern for the Palestinians -- as in the case of the Ulsterman Tom Paulin.

The Hamill anthology, at www.poetsagainstthewar.org, contains poetry that is worthy and memorable -- that of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Hayden Carruth. Much of the rest is group-think dreck; some is ranting foolishness committed by people who should know better.

The world needs its poets at times like this; poets always need readers willing to feel and think.