‘dichtung und wahrheit’ same. Should writers take a stand, and how? What constitutes a political poem?
Howdo we measure its success? A good place to start any search for answers is
Robert Duncan’s correspondence with Denise Levertov, which stages one of the
great confrontations of the sceptical andengag ́eimaginations in twentieth-century
writing. Both came to prominence as Black Mountain poets in Donald Allen’s
The New American Poetry(1960), but after many years of friendship and mutual
support, they quarrelled over Levertov’s anti-Vietnam poems of the late 1960s.
With his Blakean, anarchist temperament, Duncan is unable to conceive of war
as, in itself, a bad thing: the search for justice and truth is a state of conflict, not
rest. The poet’s function, he insisted, is ‘not to oppose evil, but to imagine it’.^3
When Levertov describes the apolitical privilege of rich young women in her poem
‘Tenebrae’ with the phrase ‘They are not listening’, Duncan surprisingly finds all the
coercion and violence on Levertov’s side: ‘It is the poem itself that is not listening,
that has turned to the vanity that all moralizing is in order to evade the imminent
content of the announced theme.’^4 In the era of flower power and nationwide
anti-war protests, Duncan writes with antinomian fury against the artist as political
spokesman. What he objects to principally is the instrumentalization of poetic
language for non-literary ends, not just for artistic reasons but because he denies
any transference from literaryto non-literary discourse:
When [protest] is directed towards ameans-end, it is either futile or, succeeding, belongs to
a complex of political meanings that can have no ‘truth in itself.’ This is of the nature of all
acts in so far as they aremeans, i.e. not identical with their own intent....[W]e do not say
something by means of the poem but the poem is itself the immediacy of saying—it has its
own meaning.^5
A poem which offers itself up to the ‘means-end’ of political protest has ceased to be
a poem. Their stand-off slowly killed Duncan and Levertov’s friendship, and even
today Duncan’s implacability represents a challenge to any writer who would equate
political righteousness with artistic success. Writing on the Duncan–Levertov
correspondence, Marjorie Perloff strikes an apologetic note: ‘Is what seems like
a one-dimensional and simplistic lyric outburst against injustice or racism to be
praised because its author is a member of a minority group and hence not to be
subjected to the literary norms of the dominant race and class?’^6 Even to admit
the question is to assume that a one-dimensional and simplistic utterance on the
right side of any argument is worth having in the first place. Why should it be? In
(^3) Robert Duncan to Denise Levertov, 19 Oct./3 Nov. 1971, inThe Letters of Robert Duncan and
Denise Levertov, ed. Robert J. Bertholf and Albert Gelpi (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
2004), 669. This long letter has two dates on it.
(^4) Duncan to Denise Levertov, ibid. 666. For Levertov’s ‘Tenebrae’, see Levertov,New Selected Poems
(Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2003), 92.
(^5) Duncan to Denise Levertov, 28 Oct. 1966 and 19 Oct./3 Nov. 1971, inLetters, 558 and 668.
(^6) Marjorie Perloff,Poetry On & Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions(Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1998), 220.