The Poet's Obligation
July 25, 2009 12:31 PM   Subscribe

Exit wounds: - It is the poet's obligation, wrote Plato, to bear witness. With the official inquiry into Iraq imminent and the war in Afghanistan returning dead teenagers; Carol Duffy, recently elected UK Poet Laureate invited a range of her fellow poets to bear witness, each in their own way, to these matters of war. More about the poets inside: posted by adamvasco (13 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
Dulce Et Decorum Est
posted by BitterOldPunk at 12:45 PM on July 25, 2009 [1 favorite]


Some interesting stuff here, thanks. I like Duffy's own contribution. Some of the others strike me as a little undercooked (the kind of poem to which the expected response is "yeah, right on!"--which seems to have more to do with the sentiments than the form).

I'm trying to think, though, when Plato said that it was a poet's obligation to bear witness. It sounds terribly un-Platonic. Anyone know what passage of Plato's Duffy has in mind?
posted by yoink at 1:03 PM on July 25, 2009


"Poppies," "Landlock," and "Inquiry" aren't bad. The rest are rather one-note and predictable, which is a bit depressing considering what was written after World War I.
posted by nasreddin at 1:04 PM on July 25, 2009


"Poppies," "Landlock," and "Inquiry" aren't bad. The rest are rather one-note and predictable, which is a bit depressing considering what was written after World War I.

Well, to be fair, libraries full of crap were written after WWI. It's just that we only read the good stuff now.
posted by yoink at 1:05 PM on July 25, 2009


> I'm trying to think, though, when Plato said that it was a poet's obligation to bear witness. It sounds terribly un-Platonic. Anyone know what passage of Plato's Duffy has in mind?

Sounds like bullshit to me. In the Laws he says of witnesses in general "he who is summoned shall come to the trial; and if he knows and is willing to bear witness, let him bear witness..." But that has nothing to do with poets (except insofar as they might be called like any other citizen). If anyone can come up with an actual citation from Plato saying that, I'll eat one of my many hats.
posted by languagehat at 2:35 PM on July 25, 2009 [3 favorites]


Plato famously has the poets exiled in the Republic, although of course he wrote dialogues so could have represented other positions in other places... But poetry isn't true knowledge or wisdom according to that argument, and is dangerous for a just society.
posted by mdn at 2:46 PM on July 25, 2009


It's interesting; if you Google the exact phrase "to bear witness" plus the word "poets" you get a lot of very diverse hits with all kinds of contemporary people saying that the task of the poet (or of art in general) is "to bear witness." It's clearly an accepted truism today. I wonder who first made the claim in that form, though? It's close, of course, to the old idea of art as "mirror of nature," but with, I think, a difference. I imagine it became a really popular idea in the wake of the Holocaust ("to bear witness" with "Primo Levi" generates some 25,000 hits).

God knows how the idea would get associated with Plato, though. I suppose it's possible that she has in mind the one exception Plato offers to his ban on poets in The Republic, which is poems in praise of heros. I don't think that Duffy would be likely to have solicited any poems of that kind, however.
posted by yoink at 3:00 PM on July 25, 2009 [1 favorite]


It's interesting; if you Google the exact phrase "to bear witness" plus the word "poets" you get a lot of very diverse hits with all kinds of contemporary people saying that the task of the poet (or of art in general) is "to bear witness." It's clearly an accepted truism today. I wonder who first made the claim in that form, though? It's close, of course, to the old idea of art as "mirror of nature," but with, I think, a difference. I imagine it became a really popular idea in the wake of the Holocaust ("to bear witness" with "Primo Levi" generates some 25,000 hits).

The funny thing about the phrase is that doesn't mean anything. It sounds Important and Profound, sure, like "speaking truth to power." But there's nothing about the poet that makes him any better qualified to bear witness than anyone else, nor is there any way to tell what a poet is actually doing when he's fulfilling this responsibility. A single Studs Terkel book "bears more witness" than all these poets combined.
posted by nasreddin at 3:16 PM on July 25, 2009 [1 favorite]


Um, *it* doesn't mean anything, of course.
posted by nasreddin at 3:21 PM on July 25, 2009


Of course a lot of the WWI poetry was written by actual combatants and in that sense their poetry could be said to "bear witness" to the appalling sights they had actually, well, witnessed. There is a problem with calling whatever Paul Muldoon or Carol Duffy does in a poem about Iraq or Afghanistan "bearing witness." If it "bears witness" to anything it's to a certain (rather predictable) political approach to other people's 'testimony.' And if it is fair to say that poetry "bears witness" to the state of mind of the author writing the poetry then it becomes a vacuous statement: no poem could ever do anything but bear witness in that sense.

I think the popularity of the phrase speaks to the felt powerlessness of the contemporary intellectual. It would feel utterly hollow in this day and age to take up a banner like Shelley's "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," but nobody wants to accept Auden's dictum that "Poetry makes nothing happen." So you get "bearing witness"; the perfect "what I do matters" for people who aren't really sure if that's true.
posted by yoink at 3:33 PM on July 25, 2009 [4 favorites]


I think the popularity of the phrase speaks to the felt powerlessness of the contemporary intellectual. It would feel utterly hollow in this day and age to take up a banner like Shelley's "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," but nobody wants to accept Auden's dictum that "Poetry makes nothing happen." So you get "bearing witness"; the perfect "what I do matters" for people who aren't really sure if that's true.

Yeah, that's exactly it. (In fact I was about to say the same thing, if less eloquently.) There's also the fact that this characterization, in a way, erases the poet: if your purpose is to bear witness to icky things like injustice and death, you shouldn't be so frivolous as to pollute your message with extraneous concerns about form and language and stuff. In other words, it makes mediocre poets feel better about what they're doing, but it impoverishes poetry in the process. (This is the sort of thinking that leads to Paul Celan being universally considered a "Holocaust poet," as if he were some kind of Anne Frank frozen in amber instead of a wonderfully deep and philosophical student of German and French thought.)
posted by nasreddin at 4:39 PM on July 25, 2009 [1 favorite]


Does anybody else out there think that Paul Muldoon is not only overrated but absolutely awful?
posted by bokane at 9:31 PM on July 25, 2009


Yeah, Plato would not be on board with this at all. I'm very pleased other people are already here with the "Plato didn't say that" banner. It's getting a lot of use lately, good thing we had it made.

Plato doesn't think accurate depiction of the everyday world is the goal of any worthy art. Art is good if it promotes correct values and correct habits of mind, and if it has bad effects on the viewer or listener, Plato (in the Republic anyway) thinks it should be suppressed.

In particular, he explicitly thinks poems about the horrors of war will degrade the courage of people who hear them, and so should be suppressed.

For more detail see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Plato on Poetry and Rhetoric.
posted by LobsterMitten at 11:04 PM on July 25, 2009


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