[Joseph Bottum]

In honor of the political season, here's a small-subjected but elegant little poem from Hardy, about the wife of a defeated member of parliament. Hardy was so good at this kind of thing.

THE REJECTED MEMBER'S WIFE

We shall see her no more
On the balcony,
Smiling, while hurt, at the roar
As of surging sea
From the stormy sturdy band
Who have doomed her lord's cause,
Though she waves her little hand
As it were applause.

Here will be candidates yet,
And candidates' wives,
Fervid with zeal to set
Their ideals on our lives:
Here will come market-men
On the market-days,
Here will clash now and then
More such party assays.

And the balcony will fill
When such times are renewed,
And the throng in the street will thrill
With to-day's mettled mood;
But she will no more stand
In the sunshine there,
With that wave of her white-gloved hand,
And that chestnut hair.

--Thomas Hardy, 1906

[Janet Kenny]

Just beautiful Jody. I didn't know it. How observant Hardy was. There are a couple of Chinese poems in the other thread that have some insights worthy of Hardy.
best,
Janet

[A. E. Stallings]

Jody--thanks so much for posting this. I don't remember reading this before. Marvellous! Thanks so much for bringing to our attention. Hardy's scope, as well as skill, never ceases to amaze.

I had been thinking of starting a thread on "poetry about politicians" rather than, say, political poetry, another animal altogether. For a process that affects our lives so much, there does seem to be a paucity of poetry on it, at least at first thought. Maybe others will prove me wrong with their copious examples!

Do you mind if I include a bit by Lucretius here? He was very much against participation in politics as an Epicurean--it is an unnecessary vexation that will lead neither to pleasure nor happiness. Such a stance was very un-Roman and thus subversive. (Much of our election vocabulary is Roman--a candidate is of course a wearer of white robes, ambition means to "go around" seeking votes, and so on.) He speaks so bitterly about the disappointments of campaigning on several occasions that I rather suspect he speaks from personal experience. Here is one brief patch (my translation)--from the third book--in a general diatribe against the seeking of power:

Take avarice and the blind drive of ambition: both may draw
Wretched men to step outside the limits of the law—
Often even as partners and accomplices in crime—
As each man, day and night, strives harder than the next to climb
Atop the pyramid of power. It is largely the dread
Of death on which these open wounds of life thrive and are fed,
For Vile Disgrace and Bitter Want seem so far from the state
Of a sweet and peaceful life, they almost loiter at Death’s gate.
Compelled by an unfounded fear, men, to evade such trouble
Amass wealth by the blood of civil war, and they redouble
Their riches in their greed, heaping one murder on another.
Stone-hearted, they take pleasure in the sad death of a brother,
While shuddering, for fear of poison , to break bread with their kin.
Likewise, envy, sprung from the self-same fear, worries them thin:
Why should that man win power? That man there before their eyes?
And be looked up to, strutting in the bright robes of high office—
They gripe—while they writhe in the mire of obscurity and shame?
Some fritter their lives away pursuing statues and a name.

[A. E. Stallings]

Here is an obvious example that springs to mind, from Milton:

On The New Forcers Of Conscience Under The Long Parliament

Because you have thrown off your Prelate Lord,
And with stiff vows renounced his Liturgy,
To seize the widowed whore Plurality,
From them whose sin ye envied, not abhorred,
Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword
To force our consciences that Christ set free,
And ride us with a Classic Hierarchy,
Taught ye by mere A. S. and Rutherford?
Men whose life, learning, faith, and pure intent,
Would have been held in high esteem with Paul
Must now be named and printed heretics
By shallow Edwards and Scotch What-d`ye-call!
But we do hope to find out all your tricks,
Your plots and packing, worse than those of Trent,
That so the Parliament
May with their wholesome and preventive shears
Clip your phylacteries, though baulk your ears,
And succour our just fears,
When they shall read this clearly in your charge:
New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large.


But perhaps more political poetry than poetry about politics?

[Joseph Bottum]

Alicia--

An interesting discussion might be on the fact that the default position of poetry is rejection of politics, the political life, and political ambition: Bene vixit, bene qui latuit, as Ovid would have it. Not all of them reject it for as philosophically developed reasons as Lucretius uses, but I'd be willing to bet that poets in the western tradition generally start from the position that politics is bad, wasteful, and unworthy of an adult's ambition.

The huge number of political poems might seem to contradict this. But suppose we set aside the ones that are driven by a particular political point. My guess is that the vast majority of the remainder would be dismissive, wry, or stoical about politicians and the political life whenever they talk about politics in the abstract. "That public men publish falsehoods / Is nothing new," as Robinson Jeffers has it. "Be angry at the sun for setting / If these things anger you."

One interesting point about this, if I'm right, is that the poetical tradition in the West runs counter to both the West's dominant social myth of the Roman civitas and res publica, and the West's dominant philosophical analysis of the Aristotelian political animal who finds virtue in interaction with other people.

The long culture-forming domination of Christianity ensures that both these elements remain locked in Western culture: the moral demand for action and the deep suspicion of the point of politics.

Jody




[This message has been edited by Joseph Bottum (edited November 06, 2004).]

[Jodie Reyes]

Originally posted by Joseph Bottum:


An interesting discussion might be on the fact that the default position of poetry is rejection of politics, the political life, and political ambition: Bene vixit, bene qui latuit, as Ovid would have it. Not all of them reject for as philosophically developed reasons as Lucretius, but I'd be willing to bet that poets in the western tradition generally start from the position that politics is bad, wasteful, and unworthy of an adult's ambition.

Jody,

I disagree that the rejection of politics is the default position of poetry, but I look at "politics" in the broad, Marxist sense (i.e., power relations). I think that in some traditions politics is inescapable, for instance, in the case of someone like Milosz or Zagajewski.

To quote Deleuze and Guattari from their book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature:

"The second characteristic of minor literatures [i.e., a literature contructed by a minority out of a major language] is that everything in them is political. In major literatures, in contrast, the individual concern (familial, marital, and so on) joins with other no less individual concerns, the social milieu serving as a mere environment or a background; this is so much the case that none of these Oedipal intrigues are specifically indispensable or absolutely necessary but all become as one in a large space. Minor literature is completely different; its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics..."

I do note you qualify later on in the paragraph, "in the western tradition." But even that is debatable, if I consider, say, poets of the Harlem Renaissance or even Milosz as part of the Western tradition.

Cheers
Jodie

[Joseph Bottum]

Jodie--

You're probably right about the broader reach of political poetry, but the way your analysis runs requires, as you note, a different definition of "politics" than the one I and, I think, Alicia were using.

I'm a little suspicious of any broad definition of "politics" that starts to sound like the entire range of social relations: If everything is political, than the word is meaningless. But, regardless of the scope of a broader definition of the word, Alicia's query on "poetry about politicians rather than, say, political poetry" suggests that there exists a smaller use of the word to mean merely the process of running for office, campaigning, and exposing oneself to public scrutiny.

And it is this meaning of the word that defines, I think, a politics to which Western poetry has typically proved allergic. The poets themselves may have done a lot of politics, in both the broad and narrow senses of the word, but asked the general question about whether someone should enter public life, they usually say, as I quoted from Ovid: Bene vixit, bene qui latuit--To live well is to be well hidden.

Jody

[Jodie Reyes]

Jody,

Thanks for clarifying. Now that I think about it, I can't come up with many "political" (in the narrow sense of the word) poems. Carolyn Forché has that famous one (also "political" in the broad sense) called "The Colonel," (set in a Latin American country under martial law, so he might be considered a politician), but I don't think that's what you have in mind.

Years ago I did notice that there weren't many poems about "white collar" work--working as a CEO, for instance. Perhaps some of your arguments could apply to that genre, too.

I'd like to think, however, that there are no a priori (did I use that correctly?) prohibitions on subject matter in poetry. In fact, the reality of the "drudgery" of politics and business is in tension with the "higher" pleasures of poetry. Surely there is poetry lurking in that tension?

Cheers
Jodie

[Joseph Bottum]

Jodie--

My observation wasn't about the banning or paucity of poetry on politics. It was, rather, that whatever such work exists usually takes as its theme the unworthiness of political life.

I don't want to subsume this under the category of "rarely treated topics in poetry." If there is, in fact, little poetry on the political life, that's not the same thing as there being little poetry on the work of a CEO. The Aristotelian account of the virtues--which is to say, the dominant account of human psychology in the western philosophical tradition--begins with the proposition that man is by nature a political animal. And if little poetry exists on the political life--the life lived in the polis, matching oneself in public scrutiny against other people--then we have a huge hole in the range of human life covered by poetry.

As it happens, I'm not sure that we lack much poetry about politics. Certainly the Greeks thought of the Iliad as containing a great deal of politics, and readers of Virgil have seen the political elements, in both the broad and narrow senses of the word "politics." Dante is full of assumptions about the necessity of people of character to enter the political realm.

But--or so, at least, I claimed in my earlier post--the general poetic treatment of this has been that political ambition is unworthy of our time: Fame, as Milton has it, is the "last infirmity of noble mind"--meaning, as I take it, that you have to have a certain nobility to imagine venturing yourself in the public arena, but you ought not to: it is, at last, an infirmity of mind and character.

Jody


[This message has been edited by Joseph Bottum (edited November 07, 2004).]

[Jodie Reyes]

I'm getting ahead of myself and misreading. Sorry 'bout that.

I'd like to hypothesize that the situation in a corporation is analogous to that in the polis (that is, a corporation is like a miniature polis); and the CEO is analogous to the politician. Thus, if seeking higher office would be looked down upon in poetry, then intuitively so would climbing up the corporate ladder.

Or perhaps I should cut my losses here.