Robert von Hallberg
         Editor's Introduction
         In recent literary interpretation there is renewed interest in the
            political meaning, explicit or implicit, intentional or
            inadvertent, of all sorts of texts. One often now reads that some
            novel, play, poem, or essay is only apparently unrelated to
            political issues contemporary with either the text's
            production or our current reading of it. This sort of
            interpretation, which is fast becoming conventional, sometimes
            slides too easily, I think, toward evaluation: on the one hand,
            insofar as a text is shown to veil its author's self-interest
            (often understood as the interest of a class or gender) with claims
            to larger concerns, the critic nudges this title a little out of
            the canon of currently engaging texts; on the other, a text
            expressive of a progressive political position is retrieved from
            the neglect it suffered from critics who veiled their self-interest
            (that is, the interest of their class or gender) with misleading
            talk of aesthetic standards. Either way, self-interest is now
            thought of as the most authentic motive an interpreter can divulge
            in a text. This kind of political interpretation can be defended as
            a healthy reaction to what is remembered as a time, now more than
            twenty years gone, when extrinsic criteria were disavowed and
            literature was said to be valuable primarily as literature.But how
            far has this reaction gone beyond formalism on the one hand and
            ideological conformity on the other toward fresh, rich terms for
            evaluative criticism? Not far, I think. Without strong evaluative
            criticism it seems unlikely, as E. D. Hirsch has argued, that
            academic literary criticism can intervene in the institutions of
            literary instruction, or indeed in the production and reception of
            the poetry of our contemporaries, which is my own large interest
            (insofar as I have any).
            It should be said too that the current trend toward political
            interpretation owes a good deal to our own narrow professional
            self-interest: as fewer institutional and economic resources have
            been directed toward the study of literature in the 1970s and
            1980s, we can all remember fondly the importance that ideas,
            especially political ideas, seemed to hold in the 1960s. Some
            recent political interpretation seems to be motivated not just by a
            desire to maintain faith with the concerns of the 1960s, but as
            well by a need of scholars of humanities to generate terms that
            render the study of literature or culture
            generally obviously important. The political shifts of the
            late 1960s and early 1970s took money, jobs, and even a sense of
            consequence away from humanities departments. The recent move is to
            restore at least a sense of consequence to literary criticism.
            However worthy that objective, there is no reason to think that
            self-legitimation will lead to the development of evaluative
            standards appropriate to the study and enjoyment of poetry in
            American in 1987.
Robert Pinsky
         Responsibilities of the Poet
         Certain general ideas come up repeatedly, in various guises, when
            contemporary poetry is discussed. One of these might be described
            as the question of what, if anything, is our social responsibility
            as poets.
            That is, there are things writers owe the art of poetry work,
            perhaps. And in a sense there are things writers owe
            themselves emotional truthfulness, attention toward
            one's own feelings. But what, if anything, can a poet be said
            to owe other people in general, considered as a community? For what
            is the poet answerable? This is a more immediate though more
            limited way of putting the question than such familiar terms
            as "political poetry."
            Another recurring topic is what might be called Poetry Gloom. I
            mean that sourness and kvetching that sometimes come into our
            feelings about our art: the mysterious disaffections, the querulous
            doubts, the dispirited mood in which we ask ourselves, has
            contemporary poetry gone downhill, does anyone at all read it, has
            poetry become a mere hobby, do only one's friends do it well,
            and so forth. This matter often comes up in the form of questions
            about the "popularity" or "audience" of
            poetry.
            Possibly the appetite for poetry really was greater in the good old
            days, in other societies. After the total disaster at Syracuse,
            when the Athenians, their great imperialist adventure failed, were
            being massacred, or branded as slaves with the image of a horse
            burned into the forehead, a few were saved for the sake of
            Euripides, whose work, it seems, was well thought of by the
            Syracusans. "Many of the captives who got safe back to
            Athens," writes Plutarch,
            Are said, after they reached home, to have gone and made their
            acknowledgments to Euripides, relating how some of them had been
            released from their slavery by teaching what they could remember of
            his poems and others, when straggling after the fight, had been
            relieved with meat and drink for repeating some of his lyrics.
             
            Robert Pinskyteaches at the University of California, Berkeley. His
            most recent book of poems, History of My Heart,was awarded the
            William Carlos Williams Prize. His other books include Sadness and
            Happiness, An Explanation of America,and a volume of criticism, The
            Situation of Poetry. Mindwheel,his narrative entertainment for
            computer, has been issued by Brøderbund Software.
Anne Burnett
         The Scrutiny of Song: Pindar, Politics, and Poetry
         Pindar's songs were composed for men at play, but his poetry
            was political in its impulse and in its function. The men in
            question were rich and powerful, and their games were a display of
            exclusive class attributes, vicariously shared by lesser mortals
            who responded with gratitude and loyalty (for example, Pythia 5.43-
            44). Victories were counted as princely benefactions (compare
            Olympia5.3 and 15, 7.94, 8.87, Isthmia6.69) and laid up as city
            treasure like the wealth deposited in the treasuries at Delphi
            (Pythia6.5). Athletic victory was thus both a manifestation and an
            enhancement of aristocratic domination, which meant that the poet
            who praised those who boxed and raced in pan-Hellenic games
            necessarily praised the social structure that depended on them.
            Pindar understood his political function and was proud of
            it "I would consort with victors"
            (Olympia1.115b).1 He believed in athletic contest as a model for
            all human life. He believed in the aristocratic system:
            "Inherited governance of cities lies properly with the
            nobility" (Pythia 10.71-72). He believed also that praise
            poetry could regulate as well as laud that system, and he believed
            finally that such poetry was itself incorruptible. Games, song, and
            princely rulers were all parts of a single brilliant order, and
            this truth had a linguistic reflection, for the bit that tames a
            horse, the meter of a poetic line, and the moderation of a ruler
            were all called by the same name metron."Measure
            (metron) inheres in everything" (Olympia13.47 and
            throughout).
             
            1. All translations are my own.
             
            Anne Burnettis professor of classical languages and literature at
            the University of Chicago. Her most recent publications are Three
            Archaic Poets: Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho (1983) and The Art of
            Bacchylides(1985). A monograph on choral poetry, with focus on the
            Sicilian poet Stesichorus, is forthcoming.
Michael André Bernstein
         "O Totiens Servus": Saturnalia and Servitude in Augustan_Rome
         To pose the question of evaluating political poetry is, of course,
            itself already a polemical move, since it insists on distinctions
            that command neither general critical consent nor methodological
            specificity. Repudiating the pertinence of such concerns to poetry
            has been, after all, the principal thrust of some of the most
            influential texts in modern literary theory. Indeed, considered
            historically, the struggle to separate aesthetic from both moral
            and political considerations can be seen as constituting the
            inaugural, grounding act of poetics as a distinct discipline. In
            such a view, the words of a poem, by their very nature, are
            radically divorced from their usage in the quotidian world of
            shared human activities, so that although a text may contain
            political themes among its material poetica,insofar as it succeeds
            as a work of art these must function purely as internal and
            autonomous elements in the structure of the piece, not as arguments
            seeking to participate in a wider discourse. Because the language
            of poetry is unique and self-sufficient, thematic considerations
            are strictly irrelevant, and the issue of evaluation is identical
            regardless of the ostensible subject matter of the poem. Political
            poetry, in other words, is a meaningless term: a work is either a
            poem or it is not, and any attempt to include political concerns in
            its creation or evaluation is simply to abandon the domain of art
            for what Mallarmé dismissed as the debased idiom of "les
            journaux."1
            Yet the very need to keep insisting on so categorical a distinction
            reveals that contamination is always possible, that the chasm may
            prove only a threshold habitually traversed by the words of any
            poem. And in fact, for every instance of a Mallarméan insistence
            upon the autonomy of the poem, there exists a counterpolemic
            stressing the link between word and world and, more pertinently
            still, between the language of verse and a search for values
            applicable to the communal experiences of both author and readers.2
            But as I remarked earlier, the very heterogeneity of these
            arguments tends to deprive them of any methodological specificity,
            and all too often discussions of political poetry have done little
            more than catalog judgments about the ideological stance of a given
            work according to a critic's fixed conception of which
            attitudes merit approval and which deserve censure. There is a
            crucial distinction between reading political poetry and reading
            poetry politically. In the latter case, the concern is less with
            the characteristics, let alone the evaluation, of political poetry
            per se than which judging how effectively the poem either champions
            or contests positions whose independent authority is always already
            guaranteed and which, in principle, are only to be illustrated, not
            questioned or modified, by literary texts.
             
            1. Mallarmé's formulation here is both categorical can
            powerful: "cette donnée exacte, quíl faut, si l'on fait
            de la literature, parler autrement que les journaux"
            (Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondence,ed. Henri Mondor and Lloyd James
            Austin, 11 vols. [Paris, 1959-85], 3:67).
             
            Michael André Bernstein,associate professor of English and
            comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley,
            is the author of The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern
            Verse Epic(1980) and Prima della Rivoluzione (1984), a volume of
            verse. He is currently completing a book on the Abject Hero and a
            study, Talent and the Individual Tradition in Modern Poetry.His
            previous contributions to  are "When the
            Carnival Turns Bitter: Preliminary Reflections upon the Abject
            Hero" (Winter 1983) and "image, Word, and Sign: The
            Visual Arts as Evidence in Ezra Pound's Cantos" (Winter
            1986).
Janel Mueller
         The Mastery of Decorum: Politics as Poetry in_Milton's_Sonnets
         If we supply a missing connection in the master text of English
            Renaissance poetic theory, we can bring the dilemma posed by
            political poetry into sharp relief. Sidney's Defence of
            Poesie seeks to confirm the supremacy of the poet's power
            over human minds by invoking the celebrated three-way distinction
            between poetry, philosophy, and history in the Poetics.According to
            Sidney, the proper question to ask of poetry is not "whether
            it were better to have a particular act truly or falsely set
            down" but "whether it be better to have it set down as
            it should be, … for your own use and learning." On this
            criterion, the philosopher shows himself too devoted to
            "knowledge" that "standeth upon the abstract and
            general," to the "precept," to "what should
            be." The historian attends too much to "the particular
            truth of things and not to the general reason of things," to
            the "example," to "what is." Only the poet
            "coupleth the general notion with the particular
            example" in "the speaking picture of poesy," thus
            synthesizing through his "imaginative and judging
            power" the best that the philosophical and historical domains
            can offer. "Aristotle himself," concludes Sidney,
            "plainly determineth this question, saying that poetry … is
            more philosophical and more studiously serious than history …
            because poesy dealeth with … the universal consideration, and the
            history with … the particular." Yet in mounting his Defence
            of Poesie,Sidney fails to give due force to a related and equally
            important distinction drawn from the Poetics.Aristotle ranks poetry
            below philosophy and, by implication, history as
            well at the crucial juncture where ontology and epistemology
            meet. He exclusively credits philosophical universals with rational
            "necessity." Poetic universals are recognized as having
            imaginative "likelihood," but no more than this.1 Under
            this second three-way distinction, the domain proper to poetry
            turns out to be neither the realm of historical fact nor that of
            philosophical truth but some half-region of the truthlike, the
            verisimilar, disjoint from the plane of knowledge.
            […]
            Milton coped with the questions intrinsic to political poetry
            during the decade from 1642 to 1652 when he rose to prominence as a
            pamphleteer on public issued and concurrently pioneered the writing
            of political sonnets in English. This essay examines the responses
            he made, in part in his prose but mainly in the composition of
            seven sonnets. Political poems in a root sense, these sonnets
            concern themselves with human agency channeled into the functions
            of the state, with power manifested through governance. After
            exploratory and uneven beginnings, the group as a whole goes a fair
            way toward vindicating the enterprise of political poetry and
            offering one set of criteria for a good political poem.
             
            1. The core distinctions are drawn by Aristotle in chap. 9, secs.
            2-4, of the Poetics;also see chap. 1, sec. 1 of the Topicson the
            distinction between demonstration, based on reasoning from true
            knowledge, and dialectic, based on reasoning from what is generally
            accepted as probable. The quotations in this paragraph are from
            Sidney: A Defence of Poetry,ed. J. A. Van Dorsten (Oxford, 1966),
            pp. 35, 32, 33, 35.
             
            Janel Muelleris professor of English and humanities at the
            University of Chicago. She has published mainly on poetry and prose
            of the earlier English Renaissance, culminating in her book The
            Native Tongue and the Word: Developments in English Prose Style,
            1380-1580.An interest in Milton, however, has drawn her more
            recently to work in the later part of this period. She is writing a
            book on nature, culture, and gender in Milton's major poems.
Elizabeth Helsinger
         Clare and the Place of the Peasant Poet
         One might say that Clare is almost by virtue of that label alone a
            political poet. "Peasant poet" is a contradiction in
            terms from the perspective of English literary history, or of the
            longer history of the literary pastoral. The phrase must refer to
            two different social locations, and as such makes social place an
            explicit, problematic concern for the middle-class readers of that
            poet's work. To Clare's publisher and patrons in the
            1820s, as to his editors in the 1980s, the language, the forms, the
            sentiments, and even the punctuation of his poetry are further
            markers of class difference for an audience invited to read him as
            a peasant poet. In recent collections concerned to recover the
            politics of English poetry these signs of difference are highly
            valued.2 They seem to mark Clare's work as what Fredric
            Jameson terms "strong" political art, that is,
            "authentic cultural creation … dependent for its existence on
            authentic collective life, on the vitality of the
            &lsquo;organic' social group."3
            At the time his poems were published class difference in English
            rural life was a political issue sufficiently charged to make
            publisher and patrons wish to minimize (though not obliterate) its
            marks in Clare's poetry. On the one hand, a clearly
            understood hierarchy was the form of social stability that rural
            scenes staged for their urban middle-class audiences. Evidence of
            class difference confirmed the survival of this hierarchy and the
            reader's position in it. Clare's poetry of place
            affirmed a system of social as well as geographical differences
            felt as a traditional and essential aspect of English
            national identity. On the other hand, however, the countryside was
            precisely where the erosion of the hierarchical relations of
            deference and responsibility was particularly noticeable, and
            disturbing, in the years after 1815. Sporadic outbreaks of protest
            against low wages and unemployment in 1816, 1822, and 1830 realized
            dramatically for the middle and upper classes what one might call a
            rural version of the process Marx was later to term alienation: the
            known and familiar inhabitants of the rural scene laborers,
            village artisans were suddenly made strange to their middle-
            and upper-class neighbors, so much so that many observers were
            convinced that they must be strangers, intruders from another pace
            (and another class).4 The elements of difference, or strangeness,
            in Clare's poetry the marks of his identity as rural
            laborer thus also risked awaking specific anxieties among his
            early readers. Clare's editor and publisher, John Taylor,
            punctuated, regularized meter, and replaced some (though not all)
            of Clare's unfamiliar local vocabulary. Nonetheless, his two
            most important early patrons, the evangelical aristocrat Lord
            Radstock and the middle-class Mrs. Emmerson, objected to some lines
            as "radical slang" and others as "vulgar."
            The language of class risked rejection as politically (and
            sexually) subversive. Especially in an already politicized rural
            scene, the peasant poet could not be a neutral figure.
             
            2. Both A Book of English Pastoral Verse,ed. John Barrell and John
            Bull (new York, 1975) and The Faber Book of Political Verse,ed. Tom
            Paulin (London, 1986) restore Clare's original orthography
            and lack of punctuation to support the label "peasant
            poet."
            3. Fredric Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass
            Culture," Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 140.
             
            Elizabeth Helsinger is associate professor of English and general
            studies at the University of Chicago and a coeditor of Critical
            Inquiry.Her Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder was published in
            1982. The present essay is part of a book in progress on
            representations of the rural scene in Victorian England.
Susan Schweik
         Writing War Poetry Like a Woman
         In World War II, however, that lonely masculine authority of
            experience the bitter authority derived from direct exposure
            to violence, injury, and mechanized terror was rapidly
            dispersing among generally populations. Graves, notes, with some
            discomfort, that the Second World War soldier "cannot even
            feel that his rendezvous with death is more certain than that of
            his Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher."5 American culture was,
            obviously, characterized by far greater disjunctions between male
            and female "experience" of war than the British blitz
            society Graves describes, and the modern tradition of soldier
            poetry, with its ironic emphasis on unmendable gaps between the
            soldier author and the civilian reader, retained its strong
            influence. Still, public discussions of war and literature in the
            United States dwell frequently on the new conjunctions between
            civilians and soldiers, front and home front, and men and women,
            focusing on their shared morale or effort as well as on their
            common deprivation and vulnerability.
            In a war newly perceived as "total," [Marianne]
            Moore's work could exemplify the power of a representative
            civilian voice. It could also represent modernism provisionally
            embracing realist and didactic functions, coming round to
            correcting earlier trends toward self-referentiality. Thus Richard
            Eberhart, arguing in his introduction to a well-known anthology of
            war poetry that "the spectator, the contemplator, the opposer
            of war have their hours with the enemy no less than uniformed
            combatants," praises Moore for abandoning the
            "complacencies of the peignoir" to write "In
            Distrust of Merits."6 His phrasing links Moore with another
            civilian war poet, Wallace Stevens; by dressing Moore in
            Stevens' Peignoir in order to show her doffing it, he
            represents her as a formerly feminine object of desire who has
            emerged from the coquetries of her sex into a new, superior,
            gender-free authority Now, Eberhart argues, "the bloodshed of
            which she writes has caused her to break through the decorative
            surface of her verse" to a "different kind of
            utterance." For Eberhart, the poem's value lies in its
            violation of Moore's usual mannered aestheticism. She
            "breaks through" a feminine surface, as if puncturing
            skin, but the result is not a wound but a mouth: a "different
            kind of utterance," in which "the meaning has dictated
            the sincerity."7Oscar Williams, in the preface to a
            comparable anthology, also reads the poem as a model of transparent
            earnestness, offering it as a solution to the problem of Edna St.
            Vincent Millay, the "bad" woman war poet who is
            excoriated in these discussions as often as Moore is extolled.
            Describing one of Millay's war poems as "a sentimental
            piece of verse written by an American civilian, designed to be read
            by … people themselves out of danger because they are protected by
            a wall of living young flesh, much of which will be mangled,"
            Williams contrasts Moore's "In Distrust of
            Merits":
                        But with true poets the poetry is in the pity …
            I ask the reader to study closely a war poem peculiarly fitted to
            illustrate my present thesis. It is also written by a woman, a
            civilian. "In Distrust of Merits," by Marianne Moore,
            is the direct communication of honest feeling by one ready to
            search her own hear to discover the causes of war and accept her
            full share of responsibility for its effects.8
             
            5. Graves, "The Poets of World War II," p. 310.
            6. Richard Eberhart, "Preface: Attitudes to War," in
            War and the Poet: An Anthology of Poetry Expressing Man's
            Attitudes to War from Ancient Times to the Present,ed. Eberhart and
            Selden Rodman (New York, 1945), pp. xv, xiii.
            7. Ibid., p. xiii.
            8. Oscar Williams, ed., The War Poets: An Anthology of the War
            Poetry of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1945), p. 6.
             
            Susan Schweik is assistant professor of English at the University
            of California, Berkeley. She is at work on a book manuscript
            entitled A Word No Man Can Say for Us: American Women Poets and the
            Second World War.
Rob Nixon
         Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest
         The era from the late fifties to the early seventies was marked in
            Africa and the Caribbean by a rush of newly articulated
            anticolonial sentiment that was associated with the burgeoning of
            both international back consciousness and more localized
            nationalist movements. Between 1957 and 1973 the vast majority of
            African and the larger Caribbean colonies won their independence;
            the same period witnessed the Cuban and Algerian revolutions, the
            latter phase of the Kenyan "Mau Mau" revolt, the
            Katanga crisis in the Cong, the Trinidadian Black Power uprising
            and, equally important for the atmosphere of militant defiance, the
            civil rights movement in the United States, the student revolts of
            1968, and the humbling of the United States during the Vietnam War.
            This period was distinguished, among Caribbean and African
            intellectuals, by a pervasive mood of optimistic outrage.
            Frequently graduates of British or French universities, they were
            the first generation from their regions self-assured and numerous
            enough to call collectively for a renunciation of Western standards
            as the political revolts found their cultural counterparts in
            insurrections against the bequeathed values of the colonial powers.
            In the context of such challenges to an increasingly discredited
            European colonialism, a series of dissenting intellectual chose to
            utilize a European text as a strategy for (in George
            Lamming's words) getting "out from under this ancient
            mausoleum of [Western] historic achievement."1 They seized
            upon The Tempest as a way of amplifying their class for
            decolonization within the bounds of the dominant cultures. But at
            the same time these Caribbeans and Africans adopted the play as a
            founding text in an oppositional lineage which issued from a
            geopolitically and historically specific set of cultural ambitions.
            They perceived that the play could contribute to their self-
            definition during a period of great flux. So, through repeated,
            reinforcing, transgressive appropriations of The Tempest,a once
            silenced group generated its own tradition of "error"
            which in turn served as one component of the grander
            counterhegemonic nationalist and black internationalist endeavors
            of the period. Because that era of Caribbean and African history
            was marked by such extensive, open contestation of cultural values,
            the destiny of The Tempestat that time throws into uncommonly stark
            relief the status of value as an unstable social process rather
            than a static and, in literary terms, merely textual attribute.
             
            Rob Nixon is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Columbia University.
            He is working on the topics of exile and Third World-metropolitan
            relations in the writing of V. S. and Shiva Naipaul. His previous
            contribution to  (with Anne McClintock) is
            "No Names Apart: The Separation of Word and History in
            Derrida's &lsquo;Le Dernier Mot du Racisme' "
            (Autumn 1986).
Alicia Ostriker
         Dancing at the Devil's Party: Some Notes on_Politics_and_Poetry
         My education in political poetry begins with William Blake's
            remark about John Milton in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
            "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels
            &amp; God, and at liberty when of Devils &amp; Hell, is because he
            was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing
            it."1 The statement is usually taken as a charming misreading
            of Milton or as some sort of hyperbole. We find it lumped with
            other readings which supposedly view Satan as the hero of Paradise
            Lost,such as Percy Bysshe Shelley's in A Defence of
            Poetry,although neither Blake nor Shelley says anything of the
            kind.2
            I consider Blake's statement simply accurate. I think it the
            best single thing anybody has ever said about Paradise Lost.If not
            clear as a bell, then at least as compressed as diamonds. The
            insouciant opening gesture takes for granted what to Blake (and to
            me) is obvious" that the poetry qua poetry is better, more
            exciting, more energetic in the sections dominated by Stan, worse,
            duller, less poetic in the sections dominated by God. As a lover of
            poetry Blake has evidently struck a perplexity. Why (he asks
            himself) does Milton's Satan excite me and this God bore me
            even though he plainly intends me to adore God and scorn Satan? The
            answer could have been that Milton "wrote in fetters"
            where constrained by theology and the danger of lapsing into
            inadvertent sacrilege, but "at liberty" otherwise.
            Other critics have claimed that it is impossible to make God talk
            successfully in a poem, but the Book of Job is enough to refute
            that position. Why did Milton choose to make God talk at all? Dante
            cleverly avoided that difficulty.
            The second half of Blake's sentence not only solves the
            Paradise Lost problem but proposes a radical view of all poetry
            which might be summarized as follows: All art depends on opposition
            between God and the devil, reason and energy. The true poet (the
            good poet) is necessarily the partisan of energy, rebellion, and
            desire, and is opposed to passivity, obedience, and the authority
            of reason, laws, and institutions. To be a poet requires energy;
            energetic subjects make the best material for poems; the truer
            (better) the poetry, the more it will embody the truths of Desire.
            But the poet need not think so. He can be of the devil's
            party without knowing it.
             
            1. William Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,"
            Complete Poems,ed. Alicia Ostriker (New York, 1977), p. 182.
            2. Let one instance serve: Marjorie Hope Nicolson wonders whether
            the members of the "&lsquo;Satanic School' of Milton
            criticism" (Blake, Shelley, Byron) have read past books 1 and
            2 of Paradise Lost(John Milton: A Reader's Guide to His
            Poetry [New York, 1963], p. 186).
             
            Alicia Ostriker,professor of English as Rutgers University, is the
            author of Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's
            Poetry in America. Her most recent book of poetry is Imaginary
            Lover.
Anne McClintock
         "Azikwelwa" (We Will Not Ride): Politics and Value_in_Black_South
            African Poetry
         On the winter morning of 16 June 1976, fifteen thousand black
            children marched on Orlando Stadium in Soweto, carrying slogans
            dashed on the backs of exercise books. The children were stopped by
            armed police who opened fire, and thirteen-year-old Hector Peterson
            became the first of hundreds of schoolchildren to be shot down by
            police in the months that followed. If, a decade later, the meaning
            of Soweto's "year of fire" is still contested,1
            it began in this way with a symbolic display of contempt for the
            unpalatable values of Bantu education, a public rejection of the
            "culture of malnutrition" with which blacks had been
            fed.2 The local provocation for the Orlando march was a ruling that
            black children be taught arithmetic and social studies in
            Afrikaans the language of the white cabinet minister,
            soldier, and pass official, prison guard, and policeman. But the
            Soweto march sprang from deeper grievances than instruction in
            Afrikaans, and the calamitous year that passed not only gave rise
            to a rekindling of black political resistance but visibly
            illuminated the cultural aspects of coercion and revolt.
            The children's defacement of exercise books and the breaking
            of school ranks presaged a nationwide rebellion of uncommon
            proportion. The revolt spread across the country from community to
            community, in strikes, boycotts, and street barricades. It
            represented in part the climax of a long struggle between the
            British and Afrikaans interlopers for control over an unwilling
            black populace and was at the same time a flagrant sign of the
            contestation of culture, an open declaration by blacks that
            cultural value, far from shimmering out of reach in the
            transcendent beyond, would now be fought for with barricades of
            tires, empty classrooms, and precocious organization.
             
            1. At least three general analyses of the Soweto uprising have
            emerged: deeper African National Congress involvement in the
            community; strains on the educational system, unemployment and
            recession, with greater industrial militancy stemming from the
            strikes in the early seventies; and the emergence of Black
            Consciousness ideology. See Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South
            Africa Since 1945 (Johannesburg, 1983), pp. 321-62.
            2. See M. K. Malefane, " &lsquo;The Sun Will Rise':
            Review of the Allahpoets at the Market Theatre,
            Johannesburg," Staffrider (June/July 1980); reprinted in
            Soweto Poetry,ed. Michael Chapman, South African Literature
            Studies, no. 2 (Johannesburg, 1982), p. 91. Soweto Poetry will
            hereafter be cited as SP.
             
            Anne McClintockis a Ph.D. candidate in English at Columbia
            University. She is the author of a monograph on Simone de Beauvoir
            and is working on a dissertation on race and gender in British
            imperial culture. Her previous contribution to 
            (with Rob Nixon), "No Names Apart: The Separation of Word and
            History in Derrida's &lsquo;Le Dernier Mot du Racisme,'
            " appeared in the Autumn 1986 issue.
Jerome J. McGann
         Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes
         What is the significance of that loose collective enterprise,
            sprung up in the aftermath of the sixties, known as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
            Writing? To answer this question I will be taking, initially, a
            somewhat oblique route. And I shall assume an agreement on several
            important social and political matters: first, that the United
            States, following the Second World War, assumed definitive
            leadership of a capitalist empire; second, that its position of
            leadership generated a network of internal social contradictions
            which persist to this day (the collision of imperialist demands
            with the isolationist and revolutionary nationalism of American
            ideology); third, that this postwar period has been characterized,
            at the international level, by an extended cold war shadowed by the
            threat of a global catastrophe, whether deliberate or accidental.
            Whatever one's political allegiances, these truths, surely,
            we hold as self-evident.
            Postwar American poetry is deployed within that general arena, and
            to the degree that it is "political" at all, it
            reflects and responds to that set of overriding circumstances.1 In
            my view the period ought to be seen as falling into two phases. The
            first phase stretches from about 1946 (when Robert Lowell's
            Lord Wear's Castle appeared) to 1973 (when Lowell capped his
            career with the publication of History). This period is dominated
            by a conflict between various lines of traditional poetry, on one
            hand, and the countering urgencies of the "New American
            Poetry" on the other. In the diversity of this last group
            Donald Allen argued for a unifying "characteristic":
            "a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic
            verse."2
            Of course, this representation of the conflict between
            "tradition" and "innovation" obscures
            nearly as much as it clarifies. The New American poets were, in
            general, must moe inclined to experimentalism than were writers
            like Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Louis Simpson, or Donald
            Justice. But Allen's declaration can easily conceal the
            academic and literary characteristics of the innovators. Robert
            Duncan and Charles Olson, for example, key figures in the New
            American Poetry, can hardly not be called "literary" or
            even "academic" poets. If they opened certain new areas
            in the field of poetic style, no less could and has been said of
            Lowell, even in his early work. And if Frank O'Hara seems the
            antithesis of academic work, John Ashbery is, in his own way, its
            epitome. Yet both appear in Allen's New American Poetry
            anthology. Moreover, who can say, between O'Hara and Ashbery,
            which is the more innovative of the two so different are
            their styles of experimentation?
             
            1. Black and feminist writing in the United States often confines
            the focus of the political engagement to a more restricted national
            theater. Nevertheless, even in these cases engagement is
            necessarily carried out within the global framework I have sketched
            above.
            2. The New American Poetry: 1945-1960,ed. Donald M. Allen (New
            York, 1960), p. xi.
             
            Jerome J. McGann is Commonwealth Professor of English, University
            of Virginia. His most recent critical work, Buildings of Loss: The
            Knowledge of Imaginative Texts,will appear in 1987. "Some
            Forms of Critics Discourse" (March 1985) and "The
            Religious Poetry of Christina Rosetti" (September 1983) are
            among his previous contributions to .
Reginald Gibbons
         Political Poetry and the Example of Ernesto Cardenal
         In Latin America Cardenal is generally regarded as an enduring
            poet. He brought a recognizably Latin American material into his
            poetry, and he introduced to Spanish-language poetry in general
            such poetic techniques as textual collage, free verse lines shaped
            in Poundian fashion, and, especially, a diction that is concrete
            and detailed, textured with proper names and the names of things in
            preference to the accepted poetic language, which was more
            abstract, general, and vaguely symbolic. But what is notable in
            Spanish-language poetry is not only Cardenal's
            "craft," in the sense given this word by Seamus Heaney
            to mean manipulation of poetic resources; there is also this
            poet's "technique," which in Heaney's sense
            means a "definition of his stance toward life."2
            Cardenal's characteristic poetic stance has been admired
            because he addresses the political and social pressures that
            shape and often distort, damage, or destroy life and
            feeling. This is apparent even in the earliest poems Cardenal has
            chosen to preserve. "Raleigh," for example, is a
            dramatic meditation from 19493 in which the treasure-hunting
            explorer marvels at the expanse and wealth of the American
            continents and out of sheer pleasure recounts some of the triumphs
            and hardships of his travels. Although his alertness and wonder
            make him sympathetic, this Raleigh's vision of the New World
            as a limitless source of wealth is forerunner to the economic
            exploitation of the land and people.
            One might ask, What are the political and social circumstances
            which, rather than distorting and damaging life and feeling,
            nurture and preserve them? Perhaps one might answer that,
            paradoxically, destructive conditions of life have many times
            proven insufficiently powerful to prevent the creation of poetry.
            And some poetry has even arisen in reaction to the destructive:
            such conditions produce resistance, which, if it cannot heal the
            spirit, can lend it strength. One might answer further that it is
            not Cardenal's or any artist's responsibility to
            establish what circumstance will form a fruitful matrix for art,
            but only to work as honestly and as hard as political, social, and
            artistic circumstances will permit.
             
            2. Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1969-1978 (New
            York, 1980), p. 47.
            3. The date is from Joaquín Martin Sosa, "Breve guía (para
            uso) de lectores," preface to Poesía de uso,p. 9.
             
            Reginald Gibbonsis the editor of TriQuarterly magazine and teaches
            at Northwestern University. His most recent books are his third
            volume of poems, Saints,one of the winning books in the National
            Poetry Series (1986), and two edited collections of
            essays The Writer in Our World (1986) and, with Gerald Graff,
            Criticism in the University(1985). He is at work on a critical
            study of modern and contemporary poetry, as well as new poems and
            fiction. His previous contributions to Critical
            Inquiry,"Poetic Form and the Translator," appeared in
            the June 1985 issue.
