This article, part of a series, builds on ideas presented in Politics and Performance Poetry and "Spoken Word as Revolution" by considering how poets in different cultures have responded to national and international "hard times". Is there something in the nature of the imagination that encourages a conservative response to social and economic upheaval? Or, as the development of beat, hip-hop and modern spoken word would suggest, will poetry remain the voice of "those not heard", even in a time of global crisis?
In his book Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry (London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1982), Cairns Craig makes reference to the theory of 19th-century thinker William Hazlitt , who was disappointed by "what he saw as the betrayal of democracy by...Romantic poets who had been the heroes and friends of his youth". Hazlitt believed that while a person's "understanding" or reason is naturally "republican", interested in distribution and relationships, the imagination is on the other hand "aristocratical, exaggerating and exclusive". Hazlitt concluded that because of its source in the imagination, "all poetry is ...necessarily sympathetic to reactionary, totalitarian politics".
Craig's work tries to solve the puzzle of how W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, while making revolutionary changes to the style of poetry during the World War One era, became reactionary politically in the inter-war period. By 1933, all three held the view "that democracy must be replaced by a society that is hierarchical, authoritarian, and ultimately, founded on purity of blood".
Fascism and the New Criticism
Craig examines the fundamental issue of whether it is possible to separate a creative artist's political self from his work. Is it true that (Craig quoting critic John Harrison) unacceptable social views are "so integral to the poetic works themselves, that they cannot help but lessen our evaluation of the art?"
This would be convenient, because as Craig points out "responsible citizens" could then "entertain the art as a part of our cultural experience without allowing [it to] challenge any of our own attitudes and values".
The school of New Criticism , influential in America between the 1920s and 1960s, advocated just such a view, that poetry and other literature should be analysed on the basis of form and words, with the reaction of the reader and intentions of the writer both irrelevant.
Craig's answer to the Yeats/Pound/Eliot dilemma is that the poets were seeking in fascism a way to preserve society's memory, what Pound called "the one everlasting repository, the Mind of the People".
Yet poetry has often been associated with the expression of protest by colonised or oppressed groups. The Suite101 article "Poetry and Identity in New Zealand and Palestine" examines the use of spoken word poetry and songs by Maori in colonial New Zealand and Palestinian people in the 20th-century MIddle East to safeguard culture and challenge authority.
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