As that highly accomplished and much-execrated author
Rudyard Kipling (once the go-to guy in college yearbooks
and currently a whipping-boy of academe) will tell you,
perseverance is an admirable trait, patience may be required,
panic doesn’t help, and public opinion is a changeable thing,
or words to that effect. Put it that way and who can argue,
but of course he didn’t put it that way, and his high-flown
rhetoric and posturing machismo seem in some measure
responsible for numerous invasions by by-jingo nationalists,
for colonial exploitation and a generation lost to world war,
not to mention the martial behavior and abusive practices
of insecure football coaches and unsavory Scout masters,
all of which goes to show that poetry does make things happen,
though I grant you, it’s often bad things and bad poetry.
Yet whether it’s the scholar’s art or the ad-man’s jingle,
whether it offers insight or invention or just lies about itself,
whatever its quotient of wisdom or humbug, a poem
is only human, whatever it says, and can’t escape the fact
that somebody wrote it, which is why it’s a fool’s errand
to ask our words to be any better than we. We like to think
objects we construct are entities discreet and independent,
that they exist alone and free on their march into the future,
or at least that their unappetizing odor of circumstance
might wear off with a little time and distance, the way
the tangled web of guilt implicated in the minute knots
of an oriental rug made by refugee children in Pakistan
goes unseen by homeowners buying textiles in New York,
and OK, the analogy isn’t exact, carpets don’t cause anyone
to enlist in the army, and even terrible poets don’t often
chain kids to a loom, but the point is that as misery inheres
in the weave so deception’s built into the verse, and all
aesthetic involves evasion, whether we admit it or not.
As for Kipling, his son went missing and presumably died
in a trench filled with mud and mustard gas, and the father
came to regret the militarism he himself had drummed up.
After the armistice, the world came to its senses, and nobody
clamored for widespread slaughter for at least a decade or two.
Then some folks, poets included, opted for one or more political
dogmas, and art was put in the service of bloodshed again,
since beauty can’t exist without its idea and must be like us,
capricious and self-contradictory, and anyway, as we know,
public opinion is a changeable thing.