Despite American poetry’s grand political past, such as Whitman’s hymns to democracy and human variety, and its ongoing achievements, some strains of American critical thought suffer from isolationism, at least when it comes to overtly political themes. Literature that engages in politics is automatically degraded by partisanship—so the thinking goes—poems are not polemics; fair enough! David Orr (“The Politics of Poetry,” Poetry Magazine, July 2008) suggests that part of the difficulty lies in trying to apply the inherited conventions of the isolated lyric voice to public concerns, along with poets’ internalization of the lyric’s biases. If, as Calvin Coolidge said, the “chief business of the American people is business,” what could poetry have to do with public life beyond a few successful advertising jingles?
Of course, much depends on what one means by politically or socially engaged poetry. T. S. Eliot described “The Social Function of Poetry” as a training in sensibility, which is training not merely in feeling, but in awareness and understanding as well; for thought and feeling are never really separated (though they might be to some extent dissociated), and their deep integration in sensibility has everything to do with how we perceive our world and encounter what is of value there. Poetry is one of the art forms that develop sensibility, which includes developing a feel for language, tradition, and culture, including the languages, traditions, and cultures of others. Any art form that trains sensibility has a very powerful social function, for it helps to develop the very matrix out which our thinking emerges.
These remain important themes to bear in mind if we are to regard art in its relationship to beauty. I suppose that the purists among us, if there are any, will hold out for a devotion of all art forms to beauty in isolation from other concerns. But it turns out that beauty itself is never really beauty itself because it is never free from further concerns. For beauty has a history and its own complex relationships to class, gender, race, social relations, commerce, on and on—a point that Terry Eagleton explores with élan in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990). This makes beauty no less compelling, though it does make it more complicated. One thing we should have learned from the civil rights work of the sixties and seventies is that beauty comes in many manifestations; and like history, aesthetics tends to be written by the ruling classes. We do well to remember that the beauties recognized by the powerful, no matter how beautiful they are, may well occlude other kinds of beauty, thereby impoverishing our experience and understanding of the world.
But earlier I was talking about overtly political poetry, which continues to have its place as well. As another critic, Leon Trotsky, wrote in Literature and Revolution (1924), the “study of literary technique alone is a necessary stage, and it is not a brief one.” At the same time, he emphasizes that truly to reflect the Revolution in art, poets and other artists must become a “part of the living tissue of the Revolution” and thus learn to “see it from within and not from without.” In other words, to write effective political poetry, one must have undergone an extensive commitment to both one’s art and social justice. These things do not happen overnight. They must work into the formation of sensibility. One need not be a partisan of Trotsky’s other writings to take this point seriously. Whether one believes in revolution, evolution, or incremental change, one’s political poetry is more likely of success if it emerges as part of the living tissue of social justice work and artistic tradition together.