Poets, Laurels, and Conscientious Objectors

Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems, New York: W. W. Norton, 2000, 280 pp.

Karl Shapiro, The Wild Card: Selected Poems, Early and Late, ed. Stanley Kunitz and David Ignatow, University of Illinois Press, 1998, 192 pp. $18.95

In revisiting the trauma of the Second World War, prompted by the recent film, Pearl Harbor, it's appropriate to remember "another part of the war," as Gordon Zahn called it: the experience of draft resisters and conscientious objectors who refused to kill. That part of the war influenced the lives and art of several major poets of the period, including Stanley Kunitz and Karl Shapiro. Kunitz, a Massachusetts native and now Poet Laureate of the United States, served as a conscientious objector in the military (1-A-O), and the late Karl Shapiro wrote an eloquent tribute to COs, "The Conscientious Objector," while on duty in the South Pacific in the early 1940s.

Stanley Kunitz. Photo: Ted Rosenberg

More recently, in his essay, "Poet and State," Kunitz posed a central question for anyone committed to social justice: "To whom can one pledge his allegiance except to the victims?" That question appears as a prologue to the new Peace Abbey film, Stonewalk, by the way, about walkers pulling the granite memorial to unknown civilian victims of war from Sherborn, Massachusetts, to Arlington National Cemetery and, later, from Dublin to Belfast. Two years ago, Kunitz received the Peace Abbey's Courage of Conscience Award, recognizing a long commitment to art and humane values, which are evident throughout his poetry, as well as his forthcoming collected essays.

"Sometimes I feel ashamed that I've written so few poems on political themes, on the causes that agitate me," Kunitz says in "Reflections," a preface to his poems. "But then I remind myself that to choose to live as a poet in the modern superstate is in itself a political action." And in a brief lyric, "The System," he provides a timeless epigram on the villainy of the corrupt politicians in every age: "That pack of scoundrels/tumbling through the gate/emerges/as the Order of the State."

With the publication of The Collected Poems, Kunitz's work assumes a place among other distinguished collections of poetry by Czeslaw Milosz and Seamus Heaney. The newer poems in the Kunitz collection are as strong and carefully made as always, with a simplicity and naturalness that characterize his work since the publication of The Testing Tree (1971). Though obviously skilled and at times deeply moving in their tragic implications, some of the clotted, "metaphysical" verse of his early years seems almost impenetrable. Notable exceptions include the great, passionate plea to an absent father, "Father and Son," which opens with these beautiful lines: "Now in the suburbs and the falling light/ I followed him, and now down sandy road/Whiter than bone-dust, through the sweet\ Curdle of fields."

In the later poems, the search for that father continues, particularly in a signature poem, beginning

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.

But there are many other, quite different lyrics, such as the witty lament for a lost love, "After the Last Dynasty," with its Chinese references: "Reading in Li Po/ how 'the peach blossom follows the water'/ I keep thinking of you/ because you were so much like/ Chairman Mao, naturally with the sex transposed and the figures slighter." In a parting compliment, he painfully admits, "Even with your small bad heart/ you made a dance of departures."

Recent poems include "The Layers," "Touch Me"--beginning "Summer is late my heart,"--and "My Mother's Pears," looking back to his childhood in Worcester. A longer poem, "The Wellfleet Whale," its setting a beach near Kunitz's summer residence in Provincetown, conveys the essentially tragic vision of his early poems, in a tribute to that great voyager, "chief of the pelagic world," in his final hour. Dying on a beach among a crowd of sun worshipers, the whale, like us, "disgraced and mortal," is given a final salute, then prayed over:

you turned, like a god in exile,
out of your wide primeval element,
delivered to the mercy of time.
Master of the whale-roads,
let the white wings of the gulls
spread out their cover.

Recipient of the Pulitzer and Bollingen awards, as was Kunitz, Karl Shapiro came to prominence early, with the publication of his second collection, V-Letter and Other Poems (1945), when he was thirty-two years old. He remained a dominant force in American letters, as poet, critic, editor of Poetry and Prairie Schooner, and teacher at University of California, Davis, until shortly before his death in 1999. In editing Wild Car: Poems Early and Late, Kunitz and the late David Ignatow have made a splendid selection of Shapiro's poems, including several from The Bourgeois Poet (1972), prose poems prompted, in part, by his admiration for Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."

The Kunitz/Ignatow anthology is a tribute to one great poet by his peers, for the benefit of younger readers and others unfamiliar with the range and power of Shapiro's work. His poems appear in any significant anthology of 20th century American poetry, conveying, often in skilled metrical patterns, the genius of institutions peculiar to American culture at mid-century. Well-known examples include "Auto Wreck," "Drug Store," "University," "Troop Train," and "The Dirty Word."

"Recapitulations," in quatrains and rhymed couplets, tells about his early years growing up in Baltimore: "I was born downtown on a wintry day/ And under the roof where Poe expired." A personal favorite, chosen by Assumption College seniors for their baccalaureate ceremony in 1969, begins, "Lower the standard: that's my motto. Somebody is always putting the food out of reach. We're tired of falling off ladders. Who says a child can't paint? A pro is somebody who does it for money."

Many of Shapiro's poems, such as "The Fly," have a satiric edge to them: "O hideous little bat, the size of snot,/ With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes." And as the editors suggest by their title--the wild card--Shapiro was an enfant terrible of American letters. But he also wrote beautiful lyrics, love poems, and brief poetic portraits of tributes to his fellow artists, including Theodore Roethke and Randall Jarrell, as well as T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden ("Without him many of us would have never happened."). These noble lines conclude the poem, "The Conscientious Objector":

you who saved neither yourselves nor us
Are equally with those who shed the blood
The heroes of our cause. Your conscience is
What we come back to in the armistice.

In an eloquent foreword, Kunitz says that Shapiro's imagination, rooted in the lyric tradition, "was armed with savage wit, contradiction, and paradox." His poems are a gift to the language, once much admired and honored, and still "definitely something to conjure with."

--Michael True, peace studies scholar and frequent Peacework contributor, is a member of Worcester (MA)-Pleasant Street Friends Meeting.

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