What use is poetry? It’s a question that has echoed down the centuries. The more violent and disturbing the times the more frequently it gets asked. Not that there were ever times when poetry could count on unquestioning acceptance. There were plenty of louts in the mead halls throwing their horns at the scops, and we all know what Plato thought. It’s over thirty years since Dana Gioia dissected the peripherality of poetry in US culture and things haven’t changed much since. Poetry, he argued then, has retreated into a noisy and diffuse sub–culture or series of sub-cultures.

Poets, more than any other kind of writers or artists, are called upon to defend their impulses and pretensions. ‘I credit it because credit is due to it, in our time and in all time, for its truth to life, in every sense of that phrase,’ Seamus Heaney said in his Nobel speech. ‘Truth to life’ is a tall as well as a very general order and in that same speech Heaney talked about the pressures of a certain kind of public expectation acting as a constraint, about his ‘temperamental disposition towards an act that was earnest and devoted to things as they are’, a disposition reinforced by his Northern upbringing. It took him time, and difficulty, and determination to resist public pressures. He sets the bar almost impossibly high as he argues for an art, or at least imagines an art, that can answer anything the world can throw at it. ‘We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin’s regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to it.’

And yet, as Heaney goes on to say, ‘there is another kind of adequacy which is specific to lyric poetry. This has to do with the ‘‘temple inside our hearing’’ which the passage of the poem calls into being.’ Poetry, he argues, is always more than moral alignment with a cause, always more than an articulation of a held position, having ‘as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem’s concern or the poet’s truthfulness’. The physical pulse of a poem, its deepest music, its fusion of conscious and unconscious making are precisely the things we end up valuing and also often the elements that get ignored when critics are issuing prescriptions they think poets need to follow.

Times of crisis are always the times when poetry’s good faith gets called into question. And we live now in a time of seemingly permanent, amplified crisis, which also happens to be a time when language itself is at its most threatened, when the large language models and algorithms of AI stand ready to ransack the imaginative legacy of the ages and repurpose it for its own devices. But I want to hold on for now to the idea of poetry as an equalling force, poetry that seeks to speak for the woman in the prison queue, the child in the rubble, the boy blown up in his hospital bed in Gaza.

Writing at the beginning of the first Trump presidency, Matthew Zapruder considered the use of poetry as an instrument of protest, citing WS Merwin’s sense of the moral responsibility of poets during the Vietnam War to record their opposition, even if in bad poems. The problem, for Zapruder, is that for all that poems might advocate and argue ‘in the end, they always are ultimately interested in something else’. And that precisely is ‘what makes poems an undependable vehicle for advocacy. The poem is by its nature and design easily distracted.’

The pressure of terrible events is everywhere as I write this. A poet like Wallace Stevens would argue that Ukraine, Gaza, the depredations of Trump and Musk, should be resisted in favour of the primary imaginative space poetry needs. Zapruder quotes his line ‘It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is not a definition, since it is incomplete. But it states the nature of poetry.’ Zapruder essentially agrees, suggesting that if poets feel strongly about events they should become activists, like any good citizen:

‘Poets, if you find yourselves worrying that your poems are not “about” political matters, here is my suggestion: every single time you feel that worry, finish your poem, make it as beautiful as you can, and then do some kind of concrete action. Support threatened communities, or the environment. Pledge yourself to participating in a voter registration drive. Give money to a political organization working tirelessly for change. If you do this, the world will benefit in two ways: from your activism, and from the beautiful poem you have made.’

But does political engagement tend to produce bad poetry? And what about poets for whom the engagement is the poetry?

Inside me contend
Delight at the apple tree in blossom
And horror at the house-painter’s speeches.
But only the second
Drives me to my desk. (B. Brecht, Poems 1913-1956)

There will always be poets driven to respond, like Brecht, to the equivalent of the housepainter’s speeches. For Brecht there was never any distinction between the creative and the political impulses; they were part of the same continuum of response. Maybe our times are too fragmented, or too overwhelming for the kind of singleness of response a Brecht might achieve. And maybe what’s more frequent is a kind of self-interruption, where poets set aside their habitual modes to answer to a specific incident or circumstance.

I’d like to go back, though, to the apparent distractibility of poetry, the poem’s tendency to wander. It might sound frivolous, but distractibility in this sense is a key component of poetry, a kind of secondary engine that pulls the poem away from what might have seemed its primary objective or destination. It’s the force that unsettles the palpable designs. It’s in the nature of all good poems to resist the intentions of poets. Charles Simic puts it better:

‘We may start believing that we are recreating an experience, that we are making an attempt at mimesis, but then the language takes over. Suddenly the words have a mind of their own. It’s like saying, “I wanted to go to church but the poem took me to the dog races.” When it first happened I was horrified. It took me years to admit that the poem is smarter than I am. Now I go where it wants me to go.’ (C Simic, The Life of Images: Selected Prose)
 
Simic was himself a product of war and division, as he makes clear in ‘Poetry and History’ where he remembers the bombing of Belgrade in 1941. ‘I have in mind a history of murder’, that essay begins, and he goes on to list the millions killed, displaced, made destitute in his lifetime. And then he asks ‘Is poetry a holiday from such realities?’ And there are plenty of poets for whom that’s true, he admits, yet ‘a poet who consistently ignores the evils and injustices that are part of his or her own times is living in a fool’s paradise’.

He singles out lines by Salvatore Quasimodo from his poem ‘On the Branches of the Willows’ as among ‘the most terrifying … of twentieth century poetry’. The lines in the original refer to the ‘urlo nero/ della madre che andava incontro al figlio / crocifisso sul palo del telegrafo’, in Bernard O’ Donoghue’s translation ‘the black scream / of the mother who came across her son / crucified on a telegraph pole.’ O’Donoghue’s translation brilliantly answers the poem’s occasion, combining  the biblical reach of the words, with their evocation of the Babylonian exile, with a raw contemporary brutality:

 ‘On the Branches of Willows’
 
And how could we have sung our own songs
with foreign heels upon our hearts,
amid the dead dumped in the squares
on the ice-stiffened grass: and the lamb-cry
of children, and the black scream
of the mother who came across her son
crucified on a telegraph pole?
On the branches of willows
our harps hung too in sacrifice,
turning lightly in the grey winds.

Towards the end of that essay Simic quotes Cioran: ‘God is afraid of man … man is a monster, and history has proved it.’ He describes coming home at night, undressing for bed and switching on the TV to see ‘a helicopter strafing some small running figures who were supposedly Vietcong and were more likely just poor peasants caught in the cross fire.’  It sent me straight to the line ‘Ó mo bheirt Phailistíneach ag lobhadh sa teas lárnach / O my two Palestinians rotting in the central heat’ from Michael Davitt’s 1982 poem on the massacre of Palestinians in Beirut by IDF-supported Christian militias, a poem that comes out of the TV report but inserts the poet’s own children into the massacre and pulls down the veil of safety and illusion between the killing site and the Dublin domestic scene. It seems to me that the kind of moral witness evident in Simic’s horror-struck viewing and Davitt’s refusal to separate the victims from the seemingly unimplicated observer is precisely the kind of necessary attention poetry can afford.

‘Can one be indifferent to the fate of the blameless and go about as if it doesn’t matter? Yes, there have been more than a few fine poets in the history of poetry who had no ethical feelings or interest in other people’s sufferings. There is always religion available, of course, or some theory of realpolitik to explain away the awful reality and ease one’s conscience. What if one doesn’t buy any of these theories – as I do not? Well, then one just writes poems as someone who sees and feels deeply, but who even after a lifetime does not understand the world.’ (Simic 2015)

But what about the zones of conflict themselves? It’s one thing for the distant observer feeling the call of poetry to answer to the mayhem and murder of war, but what about those targeted by the rockets and warplanes? In Ukraine people have flocked to poetry in large numbers. Last May Serhiy Zhadan, one of Ukraine’s most famous writers, filled a stadium with fans for an evening of poetry, something that would have been unimaginable before the war. Compared to prose, poetry is quick, a rapid response mechanism. Obviously, this has its own dangers; poems can descend into unmediated reaction, they can distort or simplify. ‘I don’t want to make evil beautiful and aesthetic,’ Lyuba Yakimchuk said in a New York Times interview. It isn’t just recognised poets who write either; many ordinary people turn to poetry to express their feelings, and the government has even set up a website to preserve their poems for future generations. This recognises that poetry has a wide public function, that people do in fact look to poets and poetry in times of crisis, that the aesthetic quality of poetry in times like these is less important than the ability of a community to express quickly what it is like to live through them, to express grief, loss, fear and hope. In other words poetry can have a communal role separate from as well as intersecting with dedicated or ‘professional’ poets.

Many poets have been killed in war, most recently in Ukraine and Gaza. In Palestine there has been an outpouring of poetry on social media and in literary journals worldwide by writers in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as in the diaspora. New collections of poems were published within just a few months of the Gaza bombardment, a rate of production never seen before, even if publication in traditional media outside Palestine has been problematic, and some publishers have met stiff resistance. Support for Palestinians is currently a cause for deportation in Trump’s America.  For poets, there’s only one subject now, and they live with the constant threat of annihilation. Weeks before he was killed by an Israeli airstrike, along with his brother, sister and her four children, Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer shared his 2011 poem ‘If I Must Die’. ‘If I must die / you must live / to tell my story,’ the poem reads. ‘Everyone is a target in Gaza,’ Mosab Abu Toha, a noted poet and scholar, who now lives in Cairo, told Time magazine. He himself was arrested, stripped, beaten and held and only released because of pressure from international media outlets. It might seem strange to be talking about poetry at a time of desperate existential crisis – no poetry can be written under continuous bombardment – yet it’s precisely because of the power of poetry that many Palestinian poets have been targeted. One of the photographs in the Time article shows people trying to rescue books from the rubble of a cultural centre after an aerial strike, an image of the determination of a people to hold onto a legacy as vital as food or water. It’s a powerful image, but not a new one in human experience.

I keep circling back, though, to what happens to poetry under the assault of language as well as weapons that war entails. We’ve seen that poets have a role in conflict and that their work tends to pivot to the immediate circumstances, not necessarily in terms of direct head or reportorial response but sometimes through an altered language or a fractured prosody. One Ukrainian poet described how the war ‘plunged many Ukrainian poets into a state of innocence, a second childhood, in which they confront the need of learning to speak the language anew’. There is a sense of that in Oksana Maksymchuk’s ‘Rocket in the Room’:

what the rocket has in common
with the room full of children
is its current location

somebody thought the rocket
belonged to the room with children
and now it’s here

Other poets felt their voices fragment. In her poem ‘Decomposition’, for instance, Lyuba Yakimchik feels herself age severely and feels her identity begin to slip away : ‘no longer Lyuba / just a – _ba_’.

There is a great paradox at the heart of poetry; it’s made out of language but at the same time it resists language, it hides from language. Or it hides from the kind of articulacy prose can take for granted. It is as much silence as utterance, or rather, silence is built into its utterance. Silence, hesitancy, awkwardness. This is something Ilya Kaminsky addresses in his introduction to Words for War: ‘Every poet refuses the onslaught of language,’ he says, and goes on to quote Maurice Blanchot: ‘to write is to be absolutely distrustful of writing, while entrusting oneself to it entirely’. Blanchot thought this ‘double movement’ was at the heart of all writing practice, but it’s certainly always true of poetry. It is always part resistance, part surrender. As to what happens language in wartime Kaminsky argues that ‘Abstractions very quickly attain physical attributes’ and quotes the poet Lyudmyla Khersonska seeing:

‘her own body watching the war around her: “Buried in a human neck, a bullet looks like an eye, sewn in.” The poet Kateryna Kalytko’s war is also a physical body: “War often comes along and lies down between you like a child / afraid to be left alone.”’

For Kaminsky poetry is a kind of seismograph registering violent occurrences:

‘Milosz titled his seminal text The Witness of Poetry “not because we witness it, but because it witnesses us.” Living on the other side of the Iron Curtain, Zbigniew Herbert told us something similar: a poet is like a barometer for the psyche of a nation. It cannot change the weather. But it shows us what the weather is like.’

Herbert’s comment was less neutral  than it sounds here; in that interview in the Partisan Review his words were : ‘It is vanity to think that one can influence the course of history by writing poetry. It is not the barometer that changes the weather.’ Still, a barometer is something. The reference to Herbert is a reminder, whenever the subject of poetry’s usefulness or cultural significance comes up, of how much of the great poetry of the twentieth century came out of the ruins of war: Paul Celan, Robert Desnos, Nelly Sachs, Czesław Miłosz, Tadeusz Różewicz, Wisława Szymborska, Zbnigniew Herbert, Anna Świrszczyńska, Bertolt Brecht, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Dan Pagis, Primo Levi, Miklós Radnóti, and so many more:

here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him that I (D Pagis, ‘Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car’)

And I think of those lines Czeslaw Miłosz wrote in Warsaw in 1945:

What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.
They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
So that you should visit us no more.
(‘Dedication’)

Or I think of ‘Campo dei Fiori’, where he thinks in wartime Warsaw of the brutal execution of Giordano Bruno in a Roman marketplace, watching at the same time a carousel flying high on a beautiful Sunday, the music drowning ‘the salvos from the ghetto wall’. Miłosz later condemned that poem as immoral and dishonest because, although it recorded the dying and the brutality as well as the surrounding indifference, the taverns full and the baskets of lemons being shouldered again before the flames from Bruno’s fire had died, the crowds laughing on a beautiful Warsaw Sunday as the ghetto burned, he felt that it was built on observation and on its own artifice. Yet to me it still seems one of his greatest poems in its terrible honesty. The fact that it’s possible to make an aesthetically pleasing poem out of horror does not invalidate the art or the artist; otherwise, what could ever be said?

I want to go back the woman in the queue remembered in Heaney’s Nobel speech. She appears in the section ‘Instead of a Preface’, in Anna Akhmatova’s ‘Requiem’:
 
‘In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
 “Can you describe this?”
    And I said: “I can.”
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.’
                                                                  — Leningrad, 1 April 1957
 
Introducing his reading from the poem for ‘Poetry in a Time of Crisis’, an event held at the Great Hall, Cooper Union, New York in October 2001 after the 11 September attack on the Twin Towers, Stanley Kunitz observed:
 
‘She understood if anyone ever did that though poetry requires a mastery of craft it is more than a playground for technicians. The poetry we treasure manifests itself not as an aggregate of linguistic, prosodic skills but as a form of spiritual testimony, the sign of the inviolable self consolidated against the enemies within and without that would corrupt or destroy human pride and dignity.’

And this, in his and Max Hayward’s translation, is what he read:

II
 Remembrance hour returns with the turning year.
I see, I hear, I touch you drawing near:
 
the one we tried to help to the sentry’s booth,
and who no longer walks this precious earth,
 
and that one who would toss her pretty mane
and say, “It’s just like coming home again.”
 
I want to name the names of all that host,
but they snatched up the list, and now it’s lost.
 
I’ve woven them a garment that’s prepared
out of poor words, those that I overheard,
 
and will hold fast to every word and glance
all of my days, even in new mischance,
 
and if a gag should blind my tortured mouth,
through which a hundred million people shout,
 
then let them pray for me, as I do pray
for them, this eve of my remembrance day.
 
And if my country ever should assent
to casting in my name a monument,
 
I should be proud to have my memory graced,
but only if the monument be placed
 
not near the seas on which my eyes first opened –
my last link with the sea has long been broken –
 
nor in the Tsar’s garden near the sacred stump,
where a grieved shadow hunts my body’s warmth,
 
but here, here I endured three hundred hours
in line before the implacable iron bars.
 
Because even in blissful death I fear
to lose the clangor of the Black Marias,
 
to lose the banging of that odious gate
and the old crone howling like a wounded beast.
 
And from my motionless bronze-lidded sockets
may the melting snow, like teardrops, slowly trickle,
 
and a prison dove coo somewhere, over and over,
as the ships sail softly down the flowing Neva.