On the political nature of redress

A passage from Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1995) that seems to me somewhat relevant to my post earlier to day about Woodrow Wilson’s CPI:

[Political activists] will always want the redress of poetry to be an exercise in leverage on behalf of their point of view; they will require the entire weight of the thing to come down on their side of the scales.

So, if you are an English poet at the Front during World War I, the pressure will be on you to contribute to the war effort, preferably by dehumanizing the face of the enemy. If you are an Irish poet in the wake of the 1916 executions, the pressure will be to revile the tyranny of the executing power. If you are an American poet at the height of the Viet Nam War, the official expectation will be for you to wave the flag rhetorically. In these cases, to see the German soldier as a friend and secret sharer, to see the British government as a body who might keep faith, to see the South-East Asian expedition as an imperial betrayal, to do any of these things is to add a complication where the general desire is for a simplification.

Such countervailing gestures frustrate the common expectation of solidarity, but they do have political force. (pp. 2-3)

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