THE CREEPY POLITICS OF OUR LIBERAL POETS
By Robert Klein Engler (06/25/05)
(CHICAGO, 18 June '05) Plato wanted to ban poets from his Republic. He thought that at best poets were unreasonable and at worst they were liars. After reading Christopher Merrill's interview in Poets and Writers Magazine (July/August '05) with the American poet W.S. Merwin, you may have cause to think that maybe Plato was right, poets should be banned, if not from the Republic then at least from politics.
The poet W.S. Merwin does not have a bad life. Approaching 80 and the author of more than 15 books, America has been good to him. He lives on the island of Maui where the weather is mild. He travels to give poetry readings in Vancouver and to his farmhouse in the south of France where the weather is also mild. W.S. Merwin has received a Pulitzer Prize and fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations. Furthermore, he has a reputation that other writers would envy, with perhaps the exception of Plato. As a high priest of secularism, W.S. Merwin makes a good living preaching sermons that the secular faithful want to hear.
Nevertheless, W.S. Merwin is uneasy. His is a political and perhaps a spiritual uneasiness. Events are happening around him that he cannot understand in his old age, nor can his poetic art contain them. Merwin is living through the death of liberalism and the return of religion. All his awards, travels, and words cannot hold back that future. Nor can the manufactured multiculturalism of his art, an art that is a handmaiden to a liberal ideology, help him resolve his uneasiness.
Merwin claims in his interview that, "I've realized since my twenties that I couldn't draw an easy, humanist distinction between our species and the rest of life." When the bottom fell out of his youthful Presbyterianism, it seems Merwin adopted a liberal pantheism that supports his multicultural view of the world. This is a kind of liberalism that tries to be moral without religion. It is a liberalism that wants individuality without an immortal soul. In that world, the sacrament of language ends with the din of Pandemonium.
Merwin's liberalism is also an ideology that ends in disappointment for some and anger for others. I suppose the same thing happened to many in Poland when the bottom fell out of communism and they had to deal with the revival of religion. There was a moment in their consciousness when they knew reality and politics was other than what they had believed. In Merwin's liberal world, art was supposed to take the place of religion the way communism was supposed to take the place of salvation. But that did not happen.
"This is the situation we've never had before," (Merwin) says, flaring with anger, "where you have all three branches of government in the hands of the same crooks and the same thugs, with the same rich white trash at the head of it, and you see their clones running through the Supreme Court and the media. It's really creepy." So continues Merwin in his recent interview.
It's hard to know if Merwin's words are an expression of his politics or simply one of his poems. Either way, it seems excessive and out of touch with reality. One can be against the war in Iraq or against private accounts for social security, but it does not follow that everyone in our government is a crook or a thug because they favor these policies. Furthermore, aren't the white trash Merwin speaks about by definition poor? Then, when they become rich, they go by the name of Clinton.
W.S. Merwin is not the only poet opposed to the war in Iraq. His opposition is echoed by Robert Bly's new book of poems, The Insanity of Empire: A Book of Poems Against the Iraq War. In fact, to be a poet today often means to be a clone who echoes liberal propaganda. This echo may go back to Ezra Pound when he was awarded the Bollingen Prize after the Second World War. Some liberals insist to this day that Pound's anti-Americanism made him worthy of that award. Others, like the poet Robert Frost, called Pound's award an "unendurable outrage."
"The poets role is always the same," Merwin insists, "which is trying to see and hear it whole..." If Merwin believes this, then how can he not know that other artists of good will may see and hear a whole where U. S. domestic and foreign policy is making the best of a bad situation. Anyone with their eyes open knows that the war in Iraq is not the war in Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution may have been a lie, but the twin towers going down to ashes was not. The attack on the World Trade Center means that once more the religion of resurrection contends with the religion of resentment.
The "war on terror" may be a round about way to describe the "war on fundamental Islam." Nevertheless, the war on terror is a response to a real threat. This is a threat that represents a clash of civilizations, too, and not simply a war motivated by a need for oil. Poetry aside, I suppose W.S. Merwin would prefer living in an "American Empire" rather than an Islamic one. Is Merwin so carried away by words that he does not realize, given the chance, the Taliban would burn his books?
It hardly dawns on liberals like W.S. Merwin that the reason President Bush is the president of the U. S. is because he got millions of votes more than his opponent, and not that our citizens were conned. No, for poets like Merwin, Bush is president because the rest of the nation is stupid. Liberal poets like W.S. Merwin are correct no matter what because they are part of the intellectual elite that knows better. How creepy can things get? No wonder Republicans don't give money to support the arts in the U. S.
Reading this interview with W.S. Merwin makes you wonder who is really being duped. Maybe the judges on the Pulitzer committee or at the Guggenheim foundation are the ones who have had the wool pulled over their eyes. The entire project which is poetry in service of a moribund, liberal ideology is duping people into believing that Merwin is in fact a poet deserving of prizes. What a great irony it would be if Plato were to return and say that the real crooks and thugs are the ones publishing W.S. Merwin's poems.
Robert Klein Engler lives in Chicago. He is an adjunct professor at Roosevelt University. His book, A WINTER OF WORDS, about the ethnic cleansing at Daley College, is available from amazon.com.
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