War & Peace Quote by James Laughlin

A poet watching a defeated country tries to make his compassion sound ordinary, and that’s where the line quietly reveals its pressure points. Laughlin’s “as you can see” reaches for shared evidence, as if the ruins speak so plainly that the speaker can step back from the burden of interpretation. It’s a rhetorical move that both invites the listener in and shields the observer: the devastation is “terrible” enough to justify emotion, but the speaker still curates how that emotion appears.

The core tension sits in the final hedge: “probably.” After asserting “through no fault of their own,” Laughlin adds a small backpedal that reads less like uncertainty than caution. Postwar Germany was a moral minefield: collective suffering was undeniable, collective responsibility fiercely contested. That one word acknowledges the politics of sympathy. He wants to honor the “miserable state of the people” without sounding naive about the historical forces that produced the war, or reckless about who gets absolution.

Context matters: Laughlin wasn’t just any poet; as the founder of New Directions, he helped shape American literary taste and carried a cosmopolitan, postwar sensibility. The statement fits a mid-century liberal humanism that prized witness and empathy, yet feared appearing soft on complicity. It’s not a grand pronouncement so much as a candid ethical negotiation: how to look at wreckage, feel for civilians, and still keep one’s moral footing when the world insists on verdicts.