Guerrilla Bards

By Paul Gray

DEMOCRACY AND POETRY

by ROBERT PENN WARREN 102 pages. Harvard University Press. $5.95.

Plato banned poets from his republic, but it was a Pyrrhic triumph. Versifiers have a habit of outlasting politicians, and there is a nucleus of truth in Shelley's romantic declaration, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." From time to time the acknowledged legislators agree; for one brief, shining moment, Robert Frost even shared the inaugural platform with John F. Kennedy. That, however, was a greater victory for p.r. than for poetry. The recent snubbing of Solzhenitsyn by the White House suggests that things have returned to the Platonic state. Which is where they should be, according to Robert Penn Warren's Democracy and Poetry; when poets begin pleasing the powerful, citizens had best look for the nearest exit.

Warren, 70, whose career has included Pulitzer Prizes for both poetry and fiction, does not shirk controversy in these two sinuously reasoned essays. He contends that art and democracy feed on each other, because both depend on the play of unfettered minds. At first glance, this seems preposterous; Western art has flourished under monarchies, tyrannies and varied refractions of the Imperial style. But Warren argues that the Greek dramatists and Roman poets created the very concept of free, responsible men that "in an imperfect, stumbling, and ragged way was to become more and more widely available." In the fullness of time, an elitist art helped spawn the rise of the common man.

Why, then, have there been so few memorable hymns to his arrival? Why has so much American literature, from Huckleberry Finn to Gravity's Rainbow, cauterized America's open society? Because, Warren suggests, great art is rarely hortatory about victories: "What poetry most significantly celebrates is the capacity of man to face the deep, dark inwardness of his nature and his fate."

Thus Warren's central paradox: U.S. writers have been the bearers "of bad tidings of great joy." The joy comes from their very freedom to complain, and their message, no matter how resentful, is really "an adventure in the celebration of life." A work of art is more than just an independent image. It is an assertion of the artist's own liberation.

Mini-Anthology. Warren darkly foresees such art becoming ever more subversive in a brave new technology. Artists will be pariahs, ministering to the few who can recall the significance of democracy. This prediction smacks of the ivory tower. American artists have always felt more isolated than they really were. Though it has not always understood them, the U.S. middle class has in fact lionized its writers. As for American painters and sculptors, it is now impossible for them to epater les bourgeois. Today the bourgeoisie vie with each other for possession of the most avant-garde gesture. Given this tradition, Warren's fear that creators will suddenly be ostracized seems unduly somber.

Still, his thoughts about the abrasions of the individual are valid and troubling: "We are driving," observes Warren, "toward the destruction of the very assumption on which our nation is founded." His use of American literature to buttress this charge creates an inspired mini-anthology. By the book's close, Warren's defense of art becomes an antidote to the despondency he professes. Amid all the euphoria of the Bicentennial, this small volume concludes with a sharp, and, in the deepest sense, patriotic note.

Paul Gray

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