Most of us have heard at least a portion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s game-changing “I Have a Dream” speech from 1963, which fused poetic power with prophetic delivery. The Baptist minister’s electrifying call for equality, which drew from The Gospels, helped expand awareness of the civil rights movement from university campuses to the American suburbs.
It wasn’t the first time that poetic delivery shifted the collective consciousness.
After the First World War, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon voiced a generational horror of war. Decades later their poems found their way into high school curricula of the English-speaking world. It’s hard to imagine that stanzas percolating in some young students’ minds didn’t have any influence on their later involvement in the peace movement.
W.B. Yeats’ 1919 poem, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, records the last thoughts of a man whose sense of duty lies outside the officially drawn battle lines:
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor…
The airman’s people will remain poor no matter what the war’s outcome, Yeats implies, with the rich always being the victors. In a similar vein, Randall Jarrell’s The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner has stuck in my mind ever since my teens. This five-line, frequently-anthologized poem from 1945 concerns the fate of a gunner in a World War II American bomber aircraft:
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
This is hard stuff, without a trace of lyrical sentimentality. And it‘s no surprise the relationship of poets to powerbrokers has long been ambivalent.
In November of 2011, Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States, was present at ‘Occupy Berkeley’ when Alameda County deputy sheriffs “in Darth Vader riot gear” pushed his wife to the ground and clubbed Hass.
“One of my colleagues, also a poet, Geoffrey O’Brien, had a broken rib. Another colleague, Celeste Langan, a Wordsworth scholar, got dragged across the grass by her hair when she presented herself for arrest,” Hass recalled in the New York Times. The incident led to at least one memorable protest sign – “Beat Poets, not beat poets.”
In other parts of the world, poem-making effortlessly shades into political engagement. The Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was a diplomat and a senator. In Cuba, you’ll find few statues of Fidel Castro, but you’ll find plenty dedicated to José Martí, the 19th century Havana-born poet whose writings and political struggle were enormously influential in the Cuban struggle for independence.
“In France, Paul Éluard, René Char and Robert Desnos wrote dissenting poetry while fighting for the Résistance,” notes poet Rachel Galvin. “In Italy, Quasimodo and Cesare Pavese were repressed for denouncing the regime under which they lived, as were Russian and Polish poets such as Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz.”
“Contemporary Middle Eastern poets such as Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Nizar Qabbani, Adonis, Ghazi al-Gosaibi and Mahmoud Darwish have embraced the idea of committed literature, or a literature engagée, as Sartre termed it.”
And, of course, poetry can’t be disentangled from song. John Lennon’s piece of chanting doggerel, Give Peace a Chance, has been a protest standard for years, and his Imagine is still rotated on AM radio like just another boy-meets-girl bauble, when it’s actually a poetic reworking of Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
Oh no, Bono
For those working the cultural coalface, the Irish nationalist W.B. Yeats has presented a rich seam of quotes. Both Sinéad O’Connor and U2 have cribbed lines from the poet in their compositions, although when Van Morrison converted “Crazy Jane on God” into song, resistance from the Yeats estate resulted in the destruction of the first pressings of Morrison’s 1985 album, A Sense of Wonder. (The family believed Yeats’ compositions should only be set to classical music.)
Mike Scott, the singer/songwriter leading The Waterboys, had greater luck with the Yeats estate with his 1988 album, Fisherman’s Blues. The final track is a melodic reading of “The Stolen Child,”with portions narrated by Tomás Mac Eoin, a singer of Sean-nós (Irish for “old style”), a Celtic tradition of unaccompanied singing.
In 2011, Mike Scott went whole hog with an entire album’s worth of Yeats’ material, some of it mystical and some of it political.
“September 1913 was written about 100 years ago about the money-grabbing clergy of the day and the bourgeoisie who were very unsympathetic to the plight of the Dublin workers,” said Scott in the clip above, discussing his remaking of one particular poem. “If Yeats were around today, I think he would have found much fuel for a similar emotive fire.”
But I don’t want to suggest that all Irish poetic compositions are memorable, or even bearable. Consider this monstrosity from the pen of U2 band leader Bono, read last month before Congress by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi prior to her introduction of…steel yourself…Riverdance.
Oh, St Patrick he drove out the snakes
With his prayers but that’s not all it takes
For the snake symbolises
An evil that rises
And hides in your heart, as it breaksAnd the evil has risen my friends
From the darkness that lives in some men
But in sorrow and fear
That’s when saints can appear
To drive out those old snakes once againAnd they struggle for us to be free
From the psycho in this human family
Ireland’s sorrow and pain
Is now the Ukraine
And St Patrick’s name now Zelenskiy
Sorry for that, subscribers. Bono has suffered for his art, and that was your turn.
Ruminations
Probably the closest spiritual comparison to Yeats on today’s bookstore shelves is a hot-selling 13th-century Persian mystic, born in the eastern part of the Ancient Persian Empire in what is now Afghanistan. To call Jelaluddin Rumi prolific is an understatement. One of his works consists of 24,000 verses, making him an inexhaustible resource for his chief explicator, the American poet Coleman Barks.
Rumi drew little distinction between love for another, love for the world and love for the universal force behind appearances. The Sufi poet’s words offer a counterweight to the image of fanatical Islamicism, and his expansive idea of the divine offers a challenge to a western culture addicted to dualisms: good/evil, freedom/slavery, God/Satan and inner/outer. Rumi writes of a creator who traffics in paradox, and the inversion of values that can occur among those gripped with righteousness:
God has allowed some magical reversal to occur,
so that you see the scorpion pit
as an object of desire,
and all the beautiful expanse around it
as dangerous and swarming with snakes.”
Although it’s hard to imagine Persian mystics like Rumi or Hafiz ending up on the reading list of West Point cadets, the former still massively outsells American poets born centuries later (Amazon.com shows a sales rank of 6,135 for The Essential Rumi, compared to 56,258 for The Poetry of Robert Frost).
As long as there are human beings sharing concerns of soul, self and social awareness, poetry will continue to work its subterranean way into human hearts. Ballads won’t eliminate bloodshed and sonnets won’t stop insanity, of course. But can poetry actually change a person or planet for the better, in its own fugitive, hard-to-quantify way? The answer has to be yes.
When the Nation State cancels Poetry, that's when we have reached bottom...though they should definitely cancel Bono because he gives it a bad name.
Mentioning the Waterboys and Bono in the same piece? Now you're on thin ice.