CHAPTER 1

The Fear of Poetry (1940, 1941)

There is, under all the surface shouting of the year, a silence in the country now.1 We feel it in the contemplation of the facts, too large, too violent to accept with reason; we know this silencing in its symptoms, the turn of the arts, the glossing over of the Presidential election, all the omissions of the deep conflict which we feel this year. I wish to speak of this silence, the fear which has fathered it, the communication which may break it, making it possible to meet the world with all the resources we have, the fund of faith, the generous instruments of imagination and knowledge. I wish to speak to you of poetry as the sum of such equipment, as an image of a kind of weapon that can best meet these enemies, the outer cloud, the stealthy inner silence of fear. Now we invoke memory, we search all the days we had forgotten for a tradition that can support our arms in this moment; we invoke a rigorous positive that will enable us to make our choices; we invoke poetry as the attitude that can clear us and make whole the spirit to face its life.

There are great gashes in our world that we have built up and that we love with so much pain. Deep gashes from which we all must suffer, the ones who foresee the effects, and the ones who never foresee any effect, but live through them only once, when they occur. Gashes are inflicted on awareness very early, and we recognize them when we look at children, or receive news of primitive people in their religion, their poetry, their ability to make dances to help them understand their foreboding. Much of that has been taken away from us; we need it now; this is the moment when we must recognize what we need, a moment in the world when whole peoples open their consciousness to their lack, and try to store up quickly whatever is most valuable, to prepare and defend and grow; and in this context enters poetry, and the fear of poetry.

There was, for a time, what appeared to be an Age of Tourists. The years of exploration, on the surface of this world, in education, or sightseeing, actually sailing seas and visiting strange cities with the stare of innocence, the quick brightness of youth abroad, or the easy aging cynicism of the perennial diplomat. That faded; we entered the Age of Fear.

When we were tourists, we were children; these were the legends and fairy stories that could be put away before we slept. Some of us were lucky; we saw these legends come to life at home; actually at home, in the day-by-day process of family and early learning. Or, later, in our own countryside, very much loved, very much trusted, but showing in glimpses the same landscapes, the same struggles, the same trials and failures. There was time to go to school with every hero. Here was a conqueror, Roman and still in his poise, who had kept notebooks of conquest that we might learn grammar; here was a statesman to provide us a parable; here was a playwright through whose faded grace, as through the curtains of his stage, we might perceive our language. There were these communications. We were told there was a sequence, there were mounting curves of incident to follow, whose heights curved up into dramatic relief. But, in our lives, shock followed shock. The symptoms of works of art became more than efforts at speech; it was clear that there was a breakdown of communication, that the arts were not as they had been, that they were lining themselves up and shouting angrily, half-heard across the distance; but during this breakdown—“breakdown of standards, breakdown of communication”—it was apparent that the myths they told were taking shape in the world, that certain cloudy struggles were actually defined and enlarging. Then the newspapers were full of it; then, at last, it could not be kept out of conversation, then it filled the world as war again, with fear its weapon.

I think now of a boat on which I sailed away from Spain. I saw very little of Spain, very little of the war. The situation that I was in was of a different nature. I had come in on the morning that the war began, on a train crowded with unprepared people from every country in Europe, and America, thrown abruptly together in the midst of crisis, and falling—and this is almost incredible, even now—into opinions which were indeed shadows cast by that future glare of wild skies full of fire, shadows cast backward into a small Spanish valley, with its sashed and sandaled men running among the trees. It was clear then, at that outbreak, which was on a small and primitive scale compared to what was to follow, that there was an arch of belief, cracked and badly sprung, but standing.2 That shape remained, through the small first battle in Catalonia, until those of us who did not go at once into the army were evacuated, and this was a ship sailing, overcrowded, its decks full, the pattern of many refugee ships to come, sailing through the dark water of the Mediterranean. On deck that night, people talked quietly about what they had just seen and what it might mean to the world. There were long pauses between these broken sentences, spoken in language after language. Suddenly, a printer, a man who had already been several times a refugee and was then publishing in Paris, said: “And poetry—among all this—where is there a place for poetry?”

That question. There it is, asked out loud.

And the pause that follows, and the force behind it! Taking one high above that ship in a black sea at the beginning of a war. High, staring down, high enough to see all Europe night-dark beneath. High, as time passes. Higher, as the years go. Until the edge sinks, and the Atlantic lies there, and higher, until the ship has disappeared completely, and Europe and America are far as maps, and the years go, and the world is visible this year. That question.

“Is there a place for poetry?”

When I say Yes, there is—when I say, I believe in poetry as the clew—I speak only very closely and for purposes of definition of the lines themselves.3 I disregard the physical reaction that defines a poem for you, what happens to the top of your head, or what crawlings go along your skin. I speak of an expressed attitude.4

Our education has made its gifts to us with an admonition: Use! All we tell you, say the schools, is to be absorbed in your lives. Every attitude is from now on your tradition. This is your equipment, with this we send you to your wars, wherever they may be. Whatever they mean. There is just this one learning, this one branch of your heritage. It is very precious, it is to be preserved; it preserves us, entire ages are given us by its grace alone—but, although it is to be memorized and stored, it is not to be used. This, of course, is poetry. In an otherwise utilitarian culture, this one knowledge is to be taught us as being Not For Use. What place has it? What is its use, indeed?5

I speak against the fear that shapes that question. And against the fear that rules out poetry, with all the other work in pure imagination, abstract art, abstract science. If communication has broken down, it is time to tap the roots of communication. Poetry is written from those depths, a source speaking to another source. And it is deep at that level that it has been stopped. The question comes up again at this moment of shock, when no kind of speech seems powerful and pure enough to carry above catastrophe. The fear that cuts it off is as deep. It plunges us deep in childhood.

Remembering that childhood, we remember the beginnings of that malignant process. The first breaks in expression follow soon; you may visit classrooms and see it happen before you, too often—the question cut off, the meanings of books undercut by explanations and parsings which in themselves need not destroy, but take that effect when they are turned loose on the very young. You may overhear it in libraries, when high school students ask each other offhand, in contempt or embarrassment, “Do you read poetry?” and wait for the headshake that means No. Or see it in adults who put all such expression far behind them. But not naturally, as a child’s toy; they put it away with a certain painful shocked awareness that here is something not for them, something that does not belong, that has no social acceptability.

And this is for the direct call, this is for the knowledge that the world is in many ways unbegun, that its beginnings, that its good and evil and all its praise is in our own hands, that as long as there is passion and agony and love and promise, the world is still to be made! That knowledge, in its full directness and under its firmest control, is the base. It is that which is met with fear.

The history of the self-control of nations is the history of civilization—their self-control and objectivity, and the products of these. The lives of those to whom we turn back are stories of the self-control of power. It is that control that gives us our traditions. And poetry is communication self-controlled, turning its powers according to the laws of the spirit. That is form, in poetry.

The quality itself has suddenly stood up alive for us once more, in the British behavior that has carried those islanders through the torture of waiting with the wave poised over them, through the torture under the wave of attack as it fell. This bracing, this silence, this critical faith and equilibrium under fire, common to any people with a sense of unity, is one of the qualities which is a source of courage to us. I speak of it here because it has, in the English, often been identified with the gesture of denial of passion and meaning which I most deeply attack: the fear itself; and it is not that. I must speak in these terms, they are the terms in which we think now. We are living in a long time of decision; many of our battles are being fought abroad; there is a fatality which brings us closer every day to those battles.6 I am glad now that I am speaking to you, and not to men of our own age; this is not anything that I would care to say to men in the months in which they are facing conscription.7 But once that machine has been switched on, there is little time to balance point against point. We recognize, among ourselves, the existence of good and evil and the wide middle country between those fearful ranges where common life is lived, that Middle West of daily life’s production, common sense, and conflict. But it is from the central conflict that the works of invention and imagination rise; to face the conflict itself requires courage and imagination. The refusal to face the conflict is the fear of poetry. The strength of poetry is the fact that it is an index to this tearing human web, to our own vivid lives. Before any of our guns begin, this is our strength, this is our equipment.

The equipment of the other side is fear. And we know that fear. The other side is as much ourselves as any external threat. The external threat cannot be met with these qualities. When war begins, qualitative differences are in armaments, not in virtues. All of these barriers are down the minute the shooting starts and the speculative thought ends for the duration; exceptions to the rule becoming rare. Many fears end at that moment, many fears are absorbed physically into the body as a meal is absorbed, so that under fire or in the stress of a night raid the only thing that can be said of stone-faced crowds in shelters, or the stony humor that develops, is that here are people undergoing fear. But what we know now, what we have in this great moment of influence, when all the forces are already at work but we are not fighting, is the old fear—the fear we had at home, and in the classroom and toward our early emotion. The fear of meaning. The fear of intensity—that curtain, allowing us to blank out, allowing us in shock to ward off meanings that turn our own lives. Often the object is too immense and harrowing. We have heard them say, Who can imagine the Chinese people, flooded and starved and broken by earthquake and bombing? Who can imagine the people of France, refugees at home, going mad on the roads, starving and betrayed and lost in their own countryside? Who can see the long stone of the Great Wall, flowing over the old mountains, and dream that it ever meant protection? Or the pillboxes of the obscenely inappropriate Maginot Line, and imagine peace? Who can face these meanings now, so soon? But this is the moment to face them. This is the only time we have. We need equipment, we need all the time and all the equipment in the world. And as it is true that everyone in the world has the same amount of time, it is also true that we are almost the only ones left who can be using that time. The others are foraging for food, looking for a place to stay the night, are out fighting fires.8 Not busy with meanings. The time for that has passed, and has not yet come again. Another deadlier tradition has been invoked.

We have our own tradition to retrace. So many times, when our scholars have talked of tradition, they have been thinking, “Repeat! Repeat!” mourning some Golden Age to whose special knowledge they had felt admitted. But tradition is not repetition, that is blasphemy against tradition. Tradition is, rather, the search for the clew—to know oneself in one’s own labyrinth, and be suddenly aware that by a thread, a subtle thread, by a thread only, could the center be reached. As it was, as it has been! But as it will not be again, except for indirection. Sheridan caught the phrase there; he warns us not to “anticipate the past.”9 Kierkegaard speaks of the foreboding eye which looks behind so that it may see, by indirection, what lies ahead.10 But at this crisis we stand at a height—a great height over the world, your truly objective visionary, with the world fighting its battles laid out as on a map far under us, with a little boat on the sea and a question asked in dread, “Where is the place for poetry?” and with the entire past from which to choose. For it is given to human beings to choose their tradition, when they have come to this point. Very early, before the ignorant tree of Good and Evil, and at the late point, with that dream of peace and freedom as common as rain and impossible to conjure out of a cloud of battle-smoke, and still with a choice of tradition! I have been living in New Haven, a town that has set up a memorial to its choice in a curious way that shocked me when I first realized what it meant. On the New Haven Green, itself a hub of tradition, there is a church which is old and respected and well-proportioned and serene. Its cornerstones are the monuments of two of the Regicides, the judges who condemned King Charles to death and escaped to America as refugees after the Restoration.11 A church founded on the stones of king-killers, on the breaking of the most extreme taboo! D. H. Lawrence speaks of the verbal shock of a first reading of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a shock that is over as soon as the meanings themselves come across in their honesty, and this is another shock of the same order.12 But that is our gesture, the violent axiom-breaking gesture of the imagination that takes its sides, chooses its own tradition, and gets to work, facing what it must face. Our religion is that, in this country, religions built on the stones of regicides. Our poetry is that. Founded on the breaking of axioms; and our sciences, our inventions. It is a tradition of the audacious spirit, of the imagination that asserts itself against the world, life and death and all the dead wars. Our poetry is the clew to much of this—it is the most naked emblem of the double image, the murder and the new church. It is a question for the psychiatrists how much the sense of guilt involved in one made for the immediate necessity of the other. But we can be sure of this, that the sense of guilt has its furious power here, it is the deepest ambition, the strongest point, perhaps indeed the Archimedean point from which the earth may be moved at will.

But all this must be used in strength. It is fatal now to hold back from any of it. Even this war that is over the world. This is a war imagination made; we saw it coming, and those a little before us saw it; and our imaginations must be strong enough to create a peace. First, to create an image of that peace, and then to bring it about. And, in the meantime, we need the audacity always to cry for more freedom, more imagination, more poetry with all its meanings.

As we approach a condition of war we will find ourselves more and more in a condition of slavery; the mock-peace of waste, pre-war conscription, and then the final constraints of war. More and more we shall need to be free in our own beliefs, since it is clear that once we accept this long momentum of rules and constraints, we shall slowly be losing many of our chances to act in freedom. And then it is too late to look at our leaders. If they represent us, indeed, they represent our weaknesses, too; in democracy, we know what we have, we elect ourselves, and our eccentric will and hesitation are reflected statistically. We shall not be wrong, I think, at any point during the rest of our lives if we call always for more freedom, more honesty. Social, personal, aesthetic beliefs need to be shaken loose; all the moulds are broken; our opinions of war and sex and tomorrow’s headlines need to be faced, recast. The last audacity will be this call: to demand that people bring their lives, their mature wishes, to this effort. Many people will be calling for the gifts of death. It is not their death, in wars or poverty, but their life. More Life, we say.

Poetry has failed us here. It has not been good enough. We want this voice now, we want voices to speak to us as we move, directly, insisting on full consciousness and a wish to move and come to life. And there is little enough to which anyone can point and say, “That poem speaks for me.” But we know that is the place. Even the advertisements know it; they cover full pages of the magazines, announcing the Oxford Book of English Verse as all that is imperishable of England—including Walt Whitman, as an English imperishable.13 And it is true, although it is not possible to prove. There will be very little of what I say that is possible to prove, or even to find tolerable examples for. The meaning is here, but few of the words have reached it. Many of the dead ones are shabby, some have shaken off the grave and stand shining and alive, but looking away, in another direction. It is not quite what we mean. They have not been saying quite what we wanted to hear. Well, we shall be saying our own words to each other; and part of our job will never be done.

It is necessary that the twenty-fifth century be able to discard our work, to reject our time. Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond them. “What we once admired as poetry has long since come to be a sound of tin pans; and many of our later books we have outgrown. Perhaps Homer and Milton will be tin pans yet. Better not to be easily pleased. The poet should rejoice if he has taught us to despise his song; if he has so moved us as to lift us,—to open the eye of the intellect to see farther and better.”14 That is Emerson saying “tin pans.” But Emerson is speaking in a very different voice from the voices we recently have heard. The war has been a Cadmus’s stone, thrown among us to turn us on what we know best; statesman has turned on statesman, shouting treason; labor has turned on labor, business on business, in fury of self-hatred and confession. The French, I am led to believe, hate the British bitterly, as the Spaniards did after their war, but most of all they hate their own surrendering leaders.15 Something as bad as that, and close to the main symptom, has happened here already, among our intellectuals, who have turned on one another, dealing out blame for the attitudes of whole generations, calling for the destruction of attitudes—at many places the attack amounts to calling for the burning of books. All through the year, which has been a crisis of evaluation and loneliness, one heard of person after person renouncing the standards of the spirit and the critical mind which had been built up through the grueling years of waste, and turn against the one face of life which was best known, ready to smash out in a gesture of rage which can best be explained as an obscure gesture of self-destruction, a gesture of impotence and failure at home. But that gesture is completely negative, very different in its nature from the anger that comes of the wish to be reached, the wish for fuller expression. Emerson makes the last demands with the greatest tolerance. He says, “Newton may be permitted to call Terence a playbook, and to wonder at the frivolous taste for rhymers: he only predicts, one would say, a grander poetry: he only shows that he is not yet reached; that the poetry which satisfies more youthful souls is not such to a mind like his, accustomed to grander harmonies;—this being a child’s whistle to his ear; that the music must rise to a loftier strain, up to Handel, up to Beethoven, up to the thorough-base of the sea-shore, up to the largeness of astronomy. . . .”16 That is insistence very far removed from the carping which we have been hearing.

It is that demand which is to be put on our poetry. Make it grow. Make it assume all the questions we are asked. Make it live our life; ask us and answer us. It is our own wish that needs more strength, not alone the poetry that is feeble. It is reflecting life.

It is reflecting your lives.

Art and nature are imitations, not of each other, but of the same third thing—both images of the real, the spectral and vivid reality. Reality employs all means. If we fear it in art, we fear it in nature, and our fear brings its object upon us, in that compulsive manner of fear, unleashing force upon the world we love. There are reasons for terror now. The middle pitch of life is not where we are going to live. The moment of great height, of infinite depth, is here. There is a famous passage in the works of the great imaginative scientist, Clerk Maxwell, in which he draws attention to the implications of what are termed in mathematics “singular points.” A stone poised on another stone, a ball rolling in perfect motion on a perfect wedge, a supersaturated solution, are examples, and the equations for their systems break down at these extraordinary moments in their history. Maxwell believed that the science of the future would be deeply concerned with these breakdowns in “systems of high rank.”17 We may be said to be living in a system which has reached such a point. Science, unfortunately, has not yet caught up with this breakdown—except insofar as it has warned us and implemented us; that is, sociology and economics made the footnotes to their foresight, for anyone to read; and we are provided with dive-bombers. But there is no exact historic science; there is no poetic science. There is history, and there is poetry, and both are going to have to reach “the largeness of astronomy” for this crisis.18

But we live in it. It is our ritual moment, our moment of proof, and we need all our implements, all the equipment tradition and invention offer.

It would be easy to be swamped by material. There is an entire theology of the Constitution. Whitman, we say, Whitman, Melville. There are clews. Melville has given us a challenge which could stand as the core of a tradition—the phrase, “the usable truth.” It is that we plunge for, that we try for again and again, burying ourselves deep in death so that we may emerge alive with it, risking whatever we are given to risk for it. He speaks of it in a moving and potent letter to Hawthorne.19 But it is this; and not the usable past, that is the kernel.20 This is capable of much life; it has not to do with time’s dimension, but with the two other dimensions in which meaning lives: function and relation. Truth in its function, truth in its relations to us, it is that that is behind my wish for poetry, and my insistence that if we face the meanings here, we have our equipment well begun. Truth, write of truth and your sentences will read like love-letters; it is something to haunt us, and we in turn may hunt it and never speak a word.

The usable truth! That is Yankee enough to satisfy the most practical person shopping for common sense. Hard-headed and durable, and serving its own purpose, and calling for its own poetry, and not countenancing any kind of fear. It makes its own demands. It sets its own standards.

What faces does it take? How shall we come by it? What color? What form? What content? Question: scan the first twenty lines of usable truth. No, but it is not so ridiculous as what is often done to poetry; because we have two criteria here. It must be there for use, immediate use; and it must be true. Nothing said about beauty, you will note. Not all this time. Not mentioned once.21 Nothing said about beauty, only facing things, and be ready, and poetry as nourishment for that, and usable truth. What has happened to all the standards? It is simple: the standards have broken down; but that, too, has nothing to do with beauty. That was before the breakdown, when “standards” and “beauty” were the same. I have not mentioned many delights, I have not spoken of the happiness we all know daily, nor of the clews we have been given, in childhood and in school and here. There are many things—but as a basis we have the fact that we are all alive in this room at the same time, and one or two wishes. A wish for immediacy, for speech. If they will only say what we want to hear! If the poems will say what we have meant all along! I think they come closest of any form to that. That is why I have my belief. I need them to be immediate, to reach my life. First of all. To make that quick acute communication, to make contact, clearing the distance between people until the real meaning lies between them, and only meaning. There are barriers, there are the deafening lonelinesses. But here is the immediacy and the voice.

People want it. They need it. The fear of poetry is a complicated and civilized expression of that need. It is not a fear of children, or of primitives, or of deeply religious people. But the great hesitation and defeat is an expression of complex need, the need for a single gesture that will cut through doubt with one dramatizing stroke. John Brown is the actor of such a gesture, who in one fanatic campaign lit up the imagination of a whole people.22 In the nature of things, Lincoln was forced to call him a crazy reckless old man, and condemn the gesture. But that gesture was able to fit into the tradition of many people, recognizably, as an active clew.

I have recently heard the story of a poet in Germany.23 He is there now, one of the few poets left, and I was told the story by one who, understanding his motives, was trying to explain the phenomenon of a poet, a man of good will, who stays in Germany and has never attempted to leave. This poet is a very generous and mild man whose writings have consisted of delicate and rather exquisite lyrics, fine but frail, in a frail voice, and his novels and journals. He earns his living as a doctor. He has stayed on in his old house, watching one after another of his friends leave the country. His wife is quite old now, as he is, and his son is an invalid. He was asked at one time to accept the presidency of the Academy, and his name was printed on the stationary before his refusal was made public.24 He did refuse, but the announcements were out, and there was a certain resentment among the refugees about all of this. There has been a lot of bitterness about his staying on without a gesture, and particularly about his acceptance of invitations to come and read his poems at meetings of the Hitler Youth. He does accept; he does go and read, to packed meetings in uniform; and he defends himself by saying, “I cannot withhold my gentle voice.”25

The meaning of that gesture is a marginal meaning whose strength has not yet been tried. Here is a man living with the framework, answering without feeling himself and his work compromised. He answers them. With what? This is one of the poems he reads to the Hitler Youth; this is a poem for which the refugees resent him.26

To keep and conceal may be, in times of crisis,

a godly service. No one’s too weak for this.

I have heard often about our ancestress,

who was a stupid child, learning her lessons

slowly. In time the village turned

the cattle over to her, and she loved her labor.

Until, in a darkened spring, the war-ghost came.

The arrogant strange leader rushed with his army

across our country and over the frontier.

One evening they heard distant insistent drums.

The farmers ran and stared at each other in the road.

The girl was silent; but her still spirit planned

the act which reaches our village now as legend.

She stole by night from farm to farm unchaining

in every stable the finest and most perfect beasts

and led them from that village, chained in dreams.

Not a dog barked; animals knew the girl.

She drove the herd through towns and off the highway

past fragrant reaches to the mountain pastures’

deep meadows; and she talked to her animals;

they were quieted by the voice of the wise child.

A bellow would have betrayed their hiding-place;

they were never betrayed to the terrible enemy

ransacking their village. And for a long time

she lived in this way, on milk and bitter berries.

At home they listed her among the missing,

lost in the meadows of the underworld.

One day the last of the soldiers left the land,

the soft land lay, green in the light of peace.

And then she gathered her leaves and flowers, and singing

led the wreathed marvellous herd down from the forests;

and the new-born calves leapt along in the field.

The girl had grown tall and lovely in that time.

She walked behind them, tall and garlanded.

She sang; she sang. And the young and old ran out.

And all the cattle streamed back to their farms.

The shouts of the children. The weeping of the old.

To whom do I speak today? Who shall tell us

that you are alive again? Who shall tell us today

that you will eat the bread of the earthly fields?

Ah, this star we live on is burning full in danger.

All we know is this: across existence

and across its lapse passes something unknown.

We name it love. And, love, we pray to you.

—It takes only a second to walk around a man.

Whoever wishes to circle the soul of a lover

needs longer than his pilgrimage of years.27

Carossa the poet provides an answer to one sort of harshness, opens himself to give graciousness of word to anyone asking it. It is his way of facing the tradition and its demand. There are many things that are not faced, and it is possible that the encounter that poetry provides is the equipment with which we will be able to face today. And there are the great strokes which we know are not yet absorbed. There are more of these daily now than can be borne. We cannot yet think about France. I do not know many people who can think about France, a nation of refugees at home, for more than a moment before they glance off of that sight.28 Or of what conscription means to us now, of what is conscripted, of that Maginot army that any conscripted army may well be.29 These shells of defense, a shell like Chicago’s lakefront before the great dark city, like the ancient ruinous Great Wall of China, like the crust of the Maginot Line, like the fear that devastates us when we shrink before the sense of destiny that fascism has turned loose, or before the deep realization offered by the meanings of poetry.

Strength is behind such shells, or it is nowhere found. And it goes deep, there will be no more level pitch of moderate and smug enthusiasm, or tourist eyesight. Faith is found here, not in a destiny that raids its earth, but in a people who, person by person, believes itself. Do you believe yourselves? When you speak, do you believe what you say? When you act, do you believe what you are doing? It comes down to that. Profound and ironic honesty, that tests itself, that stays alert and sensitive. Only let us believe ourselves and stay aware, and we are safe. For we want to be safe, the last ten years have said that with every hour. And we can be safe only by asking for more—there is a deep safety in calling, for the rest of our lives, for more liberty, more rebellion, more belief. There are many things to be fought, and these fight them. And poetry fights them, and we are safe in holding that in our lives, so that wherever we live, there is a place for poetry, and the planting of the meanings.

These faiths are possible in this country—wide faiths in a full, wide country, a promise in a land whose meanings are growing. The possible becomes very dear these days—the possible becomes the most necessary. Many acts must be effective, and quickly—to rectify, to plan, to imagine. If we can imagine the poems for this time. If we can imagine the peace for the time to come. The form and content of peace!

In poetry, form and content, relation and function, become the prey of the grammar book and the notating pencil, and these fail. The form and content of belief so reach and merge, light, penumbra, and dark unknown. The content of faith, for us, is not the opposite of another faith—it is not like the whirlpools which, north of the Equator, circle in one direction, and, southward, drive eternally opposite. It is the form that distinguishes. War or construction. Fear or imagination. I place those opposite. What threats does fear bring to your belief? What threats arrive to your imagination? How deeply are you cut off? Is your pride so frail that it can be broken by struggle? Can your privacy be threatened?

I speak of the long ranges before us, of the scenes yet to be awakened, the cities to be built, the poems written. The seas we know, the summer fields, the mountains, the dark perspectives of the choices ahead. We know, too, the shattered world coming closer to us daily—a burning ship sailing this ocean, these years—the caverns of this war, the faces of refugees pared down to nerve and bone, the sudden flaring courage and the witless death.

And the fear that is touched in all of us, that we all must learn to face and use. Know and use, and we must know and use poetry. For so long, it has been our skill that we have not used, our skill at reaching. And we must reach now. It is for us to reach each other now. Poets and their subjects, their heroes, must be meeting. We cannot allow division; most of all, we cannot allow the division of the heart. That is the enemy. The form and content of fear, to be driven against us, and we begin to know what forms it may take.

And if you come with your lives to meet what is here, you are the heroes of the poems, for there is the meeting-place. And that defines the form and content of the poetry I tell you. Facing and communicating, that will be our life, in the world and in poetry. Are we to teach this to people? All we can show them is themselves; show them what passion they possess, and we all will have learned the poetry. This is the knowledge of communication, and it is the fear of this that we have known, and that has held our hand. There are many fears that we must kill, and this is not the least of them. The uses of our knowledge are very wide, the uses of our ignorance fatal. Our lives, in a curious way, may rest on this; and our lives are our only metaphor.

The printer asked, as many may ask, Where is the place for poetry?

And shot his question over the boat, over the warlike sea, over the world at war.

You, my heroes, meet that cry with your lives! More imagination, more audacity, more poetry! It has to do with the peace to come; it has to do with personal love; it has to do with facing our hopes, deep as the bone, as surely deep in us as the living bone. Katherine Anne Porter in a letter writes, “As for facing things, we will face them as best we can; that will be our history.”30

The full collection of our lives, brought to the event, with all the grace, all the imagination and poetry we contain, will make such meeting possible.31

(Twice a Year, 1941)