Poetry Day!

It seems that there are periods of transition and unpredictability that bring out the best art, times where the old conventions prove themselves so inadequate that a mere sweep of the hand is enough. At the moment I am reading Will in the World, a very grounded, but speculative, presentation of the forces that made Shakespeare Shakespeare.
There is little or no religion in his writing for good reason: Catholicism and the Church of England were wielded like truncheons, and more than a few intellectuals and poets got the worst of it. Out that era came Marlowe, Smart, and Ben Johnson, and many others. A dangerous time, to be sure, but it was the beginning of contemporary English literature.

Another period of that was the American Civil War, the aftermath of which made the wonderful poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Bryant, and Longfellow seem crusty and pre-modern, while early early Modernists like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman found their voices.

Perhaps my favorite such period was in France during the resistance to the Nazi Occupation. Suddenly, the Surrealists (a who's who of French art in the 20's and 30's) found their concerns for art and the vitality of inner life vacated by emergency. The nation was absolutely at risk. It was being strangled. And for perhaps the last time in a western democracy, poetry became the central of all arts.

Circulated in secret, the poems of Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard asserted a firm commitment to what is beautiful, noble, and shared, and these simple, at times strange, purely lyric outpourings were on the lips of the men and women who harassed and confused the Nazis and their collaborators. Who were often tortured and murdered for their efforts.

The object of the poet's love was a woman, but that woman became conflated with France itself. French Surealist Poetry of the 40's is that very rare thing, patriotic poetry that is simple and moving, but forces a great and complex moral task on the listener.

This is translated by Samuel Beckett:

Lady Love (Paul Eluard)

She is standing on my lids
And her hair is in my hair
She has the colour of my eye
She has the body of my hand
In my shade she is engulfed
As a stone against the sky

She will never close her eyes
And she does not let me sleep
And her dreams in the bright day
Make the suns evaporate
And make me laugh cry and laugh
Speak when I have nothing to say.