War and Poetry (1945)
The subject of poetry cannot be restricted. There is no way to speak of war as a subject for poetry. War enters all our lives, but even that horror is only a beginning. The war is in our poetry only so far as it is in our imaginations, as a meaning, as a relationship, or simply as a fact. It has not been in much of our poetry because the meanings of this war have been lost; and through this the fashion in writing is aversion, wit, or easy mysticism and easy despair. We have been told by our governments—we have allowed our governments to tell us—to win the war first, and work out the meanings afterwards. This policy breeds more war, and nothing else.
For myself, war has been in my writing since I began. The first public day that I remember was the False Armistice of 1918.1 And now the terms “soft peace,” “hard peace,” that are being passed as currency seem to me only other words for war, and war seems to me the after-image of many failures to react to truth at the time that truth first happens. We confess by this war that we did not react to fascism as it arrived. But now the fact that it might be a war against fascist ideas has slipped away. So that the war for those concerned with life, the truth which is open to all, is still ahead. It is a struggle in which poetry also lives and fights.
A poet said to me, “You bring the world in too much. Poems should not be written about the war. Are you not afraid of guessing wrong?” I deny all of this. Again, I do not believe in any rule about the subject of poetry. If you do not love the world, you become the slave of the world. As for guessing wrong, I am not afraid of that. The war I think of is the common fight that is going on, the old same war, the struggle that gives these wars a touch of life—a fight which expresses itself in many ways among the people, always to make more freedom accessible to all. Peace, it seems to me, is not the lack of fighting. I want an end to false armistice. Peace, I think, is the force that works for creation and freedom, that fights war. I want that. I want peace which is a way in which peoples can work together for a wide creative life. I believe that poetry is a part of that, of the means which is peace, and of the living changing goal.
(The War Poets, 1945)
1. On November 7, 1918, when Rukeyser was almost five years old, premature reports spread about a peace agreement between the Allies and Germany. The Great War officially ended four days later, when an armistice was signed.