Hurt into Poetry: The Political Verses of Seamus Heaney and Robert Bly

One of the stubborn issues in modern poetry is the question of its proper, or most effective, political role. Since the time of the romantics, poets have tended by nature and habit toward inwardness, but certain exigent occasions, wars and revolutions, have continually “hurt” them into public utterance. Still there is always an uneasiness attending these public occasions, a sense that the true business of the poet lies elsewhere. Modern poets have only rarely played an active part in the public events surrounding them, and they have been likely to waver between Shelley’s injunction to act as “unofficial legislators” and Yeats’s more sobering advice: “I think it better that in times like these / A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth / We have no gift to set a statesman right.”This essay first appeared in The New Orleans Review 19.3-4 (Fall & Winter 1992).Peer reviewe