“…in truth, we have no gift to set a statesman right…”

On Being Asked for a War Poem
W.B. Yeats

This verse from Yeats always sets my head ringing.  My reactions to his wonderful poem are complex, however.  First, Yeats’ own work engages revolution and reaction more explicitly than any other 20th century poet in English.  Isn’t he being a bit sneaky here, at best, avoiding praise of England’s cause in World War I while reserving his right to sing Irish independence?  Maybe.  But Yeats was also a poet of dichotomies and was wonderfully unafraid to contradict himself.

Still, while eschewing propaganda, can’t a writer serve as a witness or moral imaginer of his time?  Or, if he does, must he necessarily stick his head into the yoke of partisan politics?  My question assumes that language refers to real things, not just itself, and that speaking or writing are acts with consequences in the world, not just in academe.

I might reformulate (prosaically, alas) the Yeatsian snippet.  I might hazard that a writer’s power—unlike a prime minister’s, pope’s or plutocrat’s—lies in his ability to describe, rather than prescribe.  More precisely, perhaps we are strongest when we feel, see, and think as ferociously in words as possible, then dare to show what we’ve written to someone else—even if that “someone” is only ourselves.