The Social Duty of the Poet.

Grandiloquent title eh?  I couldn’t resist it. It’s provocative.  Does a poet have a social duty at all? At the Monday group a friend prophesied that there would be a rash of poems by people pretending to have enough insight into the minds of refugees to write (often in the first person) about the experience. The rash has already started to spread. 

There are some who feel it IS the duty of art to make observations and statements on current events. Make it as immediate as possible. That's what artists did in the past, before the days of social media, they gave accounts of events, often terrible ones, that the folks back home would never hear of otherwise. 1st WW artists did what the war correspondents of today do, they documented atrocities (if they weren't paid to glorify.)

Mark Edmundson, an English professor at the University of Virginia, upbraided American poets in Harper’s magazine 2013, for being “oblique, equivocal, painfully self-questioning . . . timid, small, in retreat . . . ever more private, idiosyncratic, and withdrawn.” That’s just for starters.

“Their poetry is not heard but overheard,” he grumbled, “and sometimes is too hermetic even to overhear with anything like comprehension.”

Edmundson’s central complaint: Our poets today are too timid to say, “‘we,’ to go plural and try to strike a major note . . .  on any fundamental truth of human experience.” He claims that in the face of war, environmental destruction and economic collapse, “they write as though the great public crises were over and the most pressing business we had were self-cultivation and the fending off of boredom.” “All that matters to these narcissistic singers is the creation of a “unique voice.”

And then, naturally, there are the literary theorists with their insistence on the impermeable barriers of race, gender and class, these liberal post-modernists keep anyone from saying anything about anything but his own private world. “How dare a white male poet speak for anyone but himself. . . . How can he raise his voice above a self-subverting whisper?”

Good point, that last. But what is the answer? IS it ethical to write as though in the mind and experience of a refugee, however acute we believe our ability to empathise and our power of imagination? Or is it just piggy-backing on another human being’s terrible experience to get some glory for ourselves? I don’t have the answer. Suspect it might be: ‘It depends how it’s done.’ Not very satisfactory.