A Pretty Good Stab

“I think it better that in times like these/ A poet's mouth be silent,” run the first lines of William Butler Yeats’ “On Being Asked for a War Poem.”

A short bit of verse follows, commonly referred to as sarcastic—one way of answering when asked to write war poetry, whatever that is: “for in truth,” Yeats goes on,

We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter's night.

“Pleasing” young girls and old men—that’s what writing poetry’s about—and one would half believe Yeats, if one didn’t know how much of his writing is explicitly intended to set “statesmen right,” how un-silent Yeats was on the matter of war.

Which is why one calls the poem “sarcastic,” of course.

And then there’s Wilfred Owen’s way of writing a “war poem.” Almost contemporaneously with “On Being Asked for a War Poem,” Owen wrote “Dulce et Decorum est,” a not-too-great description of a gas attack. It ends with this stanza:

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Presumably what Owen is up to has to do with getting his readers to enter the poem’s “smothering dreams,” making them “pace,” “watch,” and “hear” the obscene and bitter symphony of war. Both tacks, the faux-quietist-but-actually-sarcastically-engaged Yeatsian version and the poetry-as-vehicle-of-imaginative-horror version one finds in Owen, are grand and well-established. Yet no-one I know is asking us for war poems to-day—not for poems celebrating the so-called “war on terror,” for poems deploring it, for verse that seeks to tease or please us out of thought about the war, as Keats might put it, poems that make readers see, hear, pace, imagine what’s happening on the streets of Baghdad or in Afghanistan.

It would be nice if literary culture mattered enough in the United States to-day that poets and writers were asked to write. But another war was fought on the media-friendly fields of consumer capitalism last century, and what Yeats and Owen would have called “literary culture” rides on the wagon too. Which isn’t to say that one should be nostalgic in time of war for the old, high ways promised by Romantic diction, but rather that one can and should make verse out of obscene gargling, make sarcasm out of pleasure, and take pleasure in sarcasm.

Which is why I particularly admired the cover of the British paper, the Independent: “Iraq: Don’t look Away,” it said, over a particularly gruesome picture of the civil war there. They meant: it’s your responsibility; “pace,” “watch,” “hear” what your “statesmen” are doing.

It’s a pretty good stab at a war poem, even if nobody asked them for one.