David Lehman’s “Peace and War in American Poetry” [by Anne Holmes]

from the Library of Congress:

November 22, 2019 by Anne Holmes

The following essay was written in 2012 by David Lehman as part of the Poetry and Literature Center’s online “Poetry of American History” series that ran from 2012-2014. The series included essays and interviews by leaders in the literary field, including former Poet Laureate Consultants in Poetry, that illustrated how poems by Americans helped define or expand the country. The aim was to complement conventional historical texts and showcase poetry’s place as an essential tool for recording our nation’s past. Though the series is no longer active, From the Catbird Seat is reprinting essays from “Poetry of American History” to bring them new light.

Peace and War in American Poetry

1.

David Lehman. Photo credit: W. T. Pfefferle

War and Peace: the title of Tolstoy’s massive novel of Napoleonic Europe trips off the tongue. Not so “peace and war”: the inversion of the customary word order represents a victory of hope over experience—or of the poetry of aspiration over the prose of sad actuality. As a subject for poetry, war has an immediate advantage over peace, because war entails action, whereas the experience of peace is an absence, not noticed until not there, like the absence of pain.

War was the first subject to quicken the pen of an epic poet. But the author of The Iliad knew that the scenes of the Trojan hero Hector in battle with Patroclus and later with Achilles would not be so remarkable if there were not also a tender scene of Hector bidding farewell to Andromache, his wife, and their baby boy, who is scared of daddy’s helmet. Epic poets have followed Homer’s lead, widening the scope of war inevitably to include peace—whether peace be construed as the absence of hostilities or as something positive in its own right.

In book XVIII of The Iliad, Homer describes the shield of Achilles that the lame god Hephaistos has fashioned for him. The shield depicts two cities—one embattled, besieged; the other functional, with a wedding and a court of civil law where disputants can settle their differences without violence. In layers of concentric circles the shield also shows some of the things conspicuously lacking in fields of battle: a vineyard, a herd of cattle, a circle of young men and women dancing, the bounty of the harvest—the fruits of peace.

W. H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” (1952), one of the strongest poems of his later period, invokes the Homeric precedent to throw into relief the bleakness he sees around him. World War II may have ended in 1945, but Auden’s shield reflects a world dominated by implacable hostility between erstwhile allies. We were at peace, but the supreme metaphor of the era joined winter freeze with military might: the Cold War. On the shield of Achilles, as Auden pictures it in 1952, are “an unintelligible multitude,” a disembodied voice proving “by statistics that some cause was just,” a martyrdom enclosed in barbed wire, a thug wielding a weapon:

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept
Or one could weep because another wept.

It is a deeply pessimistic view of human nature.

In his elegy for William Butler Yeats (1939), Auden declared that “poetry makes nothing happen.” The assertion is debatable; exceptions come to mind. But the larger point seems incontestable. Art and even love are powerless against the ruthless use of superior force. Indifference “is the least / We have to fear from man or beast.” [1] A spirited rendition of Beethoven’s fourth Piano Concerto will not stop the wars, make the old young again, or lower the price of bread. [2] “We must love one another or die”: a noble sentiment, but it will not help you win the war against the Third Reich or the Empire of Japan. [3]

The early Auden might have branded as defeatist some of the things he writes in his later work. During the Spanish Civil War, Auden had written about “the necessary murder,” a phrase he would come to rue, to disown, to revise unsatisfactorily, and to disown again. “Spain, 1937,” the poem containing this offensive phrase, ends with an exhortation to action, for “the time is short and / History to the defeated / May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.” In retrospect, this line struck the mature Auden as fundamentally wrong, even wicked, for justice (he came to see) has nothing to do with history or inevitability.

In the years between the “age of anxiety” (Auden, 1946) and the “age of Aquarius” (Hair, 1968), there were few poems of unalloyed joy upon the conclusion of wars that left the populace weary and wounded. The self-consciously public utterance of the time was either a howl or a chant from Allen Ginsberg or perhaps a nervous meditation punctuated with creepy imagery, as in Robert Lowell’s “Fall 1961,” in which a grandfather clock ticks away the seconds and “We are like a lot of wild / spiders crying together, / but without tears.”

Click here for subsequent parts of the essay, including a discussion of World War II poets.

Comments

[Alicia Ostriker]

Thanks for highlighting (later in this essay) Emma Lazarus' "The New Colossus" as a poem that refutes Auden on behalf of an ideal of peace. Here is an amplification of that point: 40 translations of the poem online with commentary.

https://ajhs.org/emma-lazarus-translations

[Soren Washington]

Hi! and thanks for this penetrating essay.

[Brian Gardner]

What a terriifc piece of writing. I learned so much!