"I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants"
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Political poems often promise action, yet the results are stubbornly ungovernable. Howard Nemerov draws a sharp line between intention and effect: the poet may imagine a verse turning the wheel of history, but the world answers in its own key. The point is not that poetry is powerless. On the contrary, it is powerful in ways that elude command. It works obliquely, changing the angle of vision, unsettling habit, giving names to sensations and pains that political slogans cannot hold.
Nemerov knew the temptations and failures of rhetoric. A decorated World War II pilot who later became U.S. Poet Laureate, he lived through eras when verse was enlisted for causes, from wartime morale to the protests of the 1960s. He distrusted the reduction of art to propaganda, not out of quietism, but because message-driven poems tend to preach to the converted, harden opponents, and simplify what art is meant to complicate. The poem may rally a crowd, but it rarely writes a law, ends a war, or reforms an institution. Even when it seems to, the process is long, diffused among countless influences.
His formulation also nods toward Auden’s famous line that poetry makes nothing happen, and then corrects it. Something does happen: a reader’s conscience stirs; a metaphor slips into common speech; an image refuses to fade; a culture’s store of feeling grows more precise. Those are political in the broadest sense, because they shape the kinds of citizens we become. Yet they rarely align with the poet’s immediate agenda. A poem meant to inflame may instead console; one meant to instruct may provoke doubt.
The lesson is humility about outcomes and fidelity to craft. Poetry acts most truly when it refuses to be a blunt instrument. It sows, rather than commands. Its changes are cumulative, interior, and unpredictable, and that is precisely why they last.
Nemerov knew the temptations and failures of rhetoric. A decorated World War II pilot who later became U.S. Poet Laureate, he lived through eras when verse was enlisted for causes, from wartime morale to the protests of the 1960s. He distrusted the reduction of art to propaganda, not out of quietism, but because message-driven poems tend to preach to the converted, harden opponents, and simplify what art is meant to complicate. The poem may rally a crowd, but it rarely writes a law, ends a war, or reforms an institution. Even when it seems to, the process is long, diffused among countless influences.
His formulation also nods toward Auden’s famous line that poetry makes nothing happen, and then corrects it. Something does happen: a reader’s conscience stirs; a metaphor slips into common speech; an image refuses to fade; a culture’s store of feeling grows more precise. Those are political in the broadest sense, because they shape the kinds of citizens we become. Yet they rarely align with the poet’s immediate agenda. A poem meant to inflame may instead console; one meant to instruct may provoke doubt.
The lesson is humility about outcomes and fidelity to craft. Poetry acts most truly when it refuses to be a blunt instrument. It sows, rather than commands. Its changes are cumulative, interior, and unpredictable, and that is precisely why they last.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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