Poetry and War

What Is Found There takes its title from some lines by William Carlos Williams: "It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there." In his attempts at thought Williams was often silly, and it is possible that he meant this literally; but it comes from a late poem ("Asphodel, That Greeny Flower") written after the Second World War, and the mood of hope qualified by anxiety could be heard about that time in poets of the most disparate tendencies. Wallace Stevens, in the middle of the war, writing a coda to "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," wheedled with his audience uncharacteristically: "How simply the fictive hero becomes the real;/How gladly with proper words the soldier dies,/If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech." The poet was doing his job in the war, as the soldier did his, or so the metaphor implied. The poet anyway offered "the bread of fateful speech"; and more honor was in the gesture than may have appeared. Both Stevens and Williams were too old then to serve as actual soldiers, and their hopes for poetry were uneasily linked to a distant pride in those who risked their lives.

The Poet's Burden, Bromwich, David, New Republic, 00286583, 11/8/93, Vol. 209, Issue 19.