More on Political Poetry

•

"I would like to say first that I believe an act of full belief very difficult to the bourgeois mind, a reflex from nineteenth-century romanticism … and that this belief is the action, the function of the writer … the writer must create from this belief the nucleus of a new condition and relationship of the individual and society and all the problems involved in that new orientation." (Meridel LeSueur, "The Fetish of Being Outside," in LeSueur's collection Harvest Song, West End Press, 1990. Originally published in New Masses, February 26, 1935.)

Eric Racher's essay "A Response to Lyle Daggett's 'Political Poetry'" asks a number of questions and makes a number of statements that are based on faulty premises.

The essence of Mr. Racher's remarks, as I understand them, consists of two points:
   1. Poetry with explicitly political subject matter is not the only kind of poetry that is valid or worthwhile.
   2. It's fine to write poetry with explicitly political content or subject matter; however, governments, political parties, and other similar entities should not attempt to force or coerce poets to express or adhere to any specific viewpoint or ideology, or to include or exclude any specific subject matter in the writing of their poems or in the content of the poems.

All human activity is political. By "political" I mean that all human activity takes place in the context of history; all human activity occurs, to a greater or lesser degree, in interaction with and in relation to other human activity. Human activity is political in its very essence.

While it is true that the political content of any given poem may or may not be explicitly expressed, and may or may not be consciously intended by the poet, all poetry (like all other human activity) exists in the context of human history. All poetry therefore has political content, whether explicit and intended or not.

To act consciously with an awareness of the implications of one's actions in relation with other human beings - with an awareness of the context of one's actions in history - allows for greater possibilities of growth and creativity, both for the individual and for the society overall, than acting without such a consciousness. To act in a manner consciously guided by left-wing, working-class, populist political principles is to act toward the greatest possible realization of one's humanity and the humanity of other people.

It is for this reason that, in my essay, I referred to political subject matter as "essential" in poetry. I did not say that poetry without explicitly political content is never any good, or that it has no merit at all; I made no such absolute categorizations; I said only that, comparing one with the other, poetry with explicitly left-wing political content is, on the whole, better poetry than poetry in which the poet has attempted to omit such content.

More specifically, left-wing political poetry is, on the whole, better poetry, considered strictly as poetry (although I don't believe such consideration is possible in reality), than poetry that omits such political content.

This is, I believe, the point of the passage Mr. Racher quotes from Lenin: not, as Mr. Racher has it, that art "is subordinated to the absolute will of the Party" and becomes "nothing more than a means to a political end"; but rather (as the quoted passage from Lenin states) that "literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat … a mechanism set in motion by the entire conscious vanguard of the whole working class."

Lenin, in the passage quoted by Mr. Racher, is not calling for the Party to take over literature (one of the often-resurrected demons conjured periodically by the necromancers of Cold War ideology); he is saying that literature needs to leave behind the rarefied atmosphere of the garden parties and the isolation of the ivory towers; that the Party needs to encourage the creation and spreading of literature by the rank-and-file of the Party organization, and by the working-class population as a whole; and that by this means, literature might be better integrated into the life and work of the Party: "Literature must become Party literature."
I don't want to imply that Mr. Racher is anti-communist or that he is advocating right-wing politics. Some of the statements he makes, however, seem to echo elements of the general world view commonly propagated by the political right.

Mr. Racher states, for example, that "the authoritarian nature of Marxist-Leninist doctrine naturally extends itself to the artistic sphere in its attempt to control every aspect of the citizen's life." He further makes offhand references to "Stalinist" purges, what he calls "treacherous double-dealing of the Communists against the workers in the Spanish Civil War," and so on. "Many people on the so-called left," says Mr. Racher, "would like to deny the existence of human nature …"

Human nature is alive and constantly changing as human beings interact with each other and with the world at large. Human nature is, by its very nature, political.

The questions regarding the imposition of ideological constraints on poetry by governments or political parties are, at their root, questions of political power, of the struggle for political power; questions that are yet to be resolved, a struggle that continues, in the real world.

Before we can fully address questions of freedom of speech and censorship - questions which in the modern world are inextricably bound up in the power relations of the capitalist market system - we need first to address the more basic questions of who holds political and economic and ideological power, and in whose interests they are using that power.

Such questions do not release poets from the demands of social and political responsibility; on the contrary, the continuing struggle for political power in the world compels us to act in the most responsible way possible. We do not, in reality, have the option of not taking sides; history is real and the sides - however provisional, and however many in number - exist. As poets and as human beings, our only choice is which side to take.