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PARTISAN REVIEW
at or beaten up. For the political scientist, Poland meant a flat territory
in Central Europe which Soviet tanks, although they had not yet done
so, would have no trouble rolling into.
In the past few decades, when poets in exile have taken political
stances, they have done so on behalf of their oppressed home countries.
They have used all sorts of strategies aimed at catching the attention of
the scatterbrained West. Yet in doing so, exiled poets will always be too
much themselves and at the same time not enough themselves. If the ex–
iled poet tries to serve as a spokesman for his oppressed nation - and to
speak out on its behalf is a moral obligation he cannot shirk - he can do
so successfully only if he uses his "way with words" in a manner which is
totally at odds with the principles of his craft. Ironically, while serving his
compatriots as a propagandist, he does them a disservice by betraying his
vocation as a poet. Propaganda is successful if the propagandist manages
to
make us forget for a moment the natural hiatus between the
schematic and limited system of language and the unpredictable and
boundless real world; if he makes us believe in the accuracy of the names
that he attaches to things. Poetry, on the contrary, is successful if the
poet, instead of making us overlook the discrepancies between words and
things, makes us more aware of them than we possibly can be in our real
lives outside the poem.
In the eyes of the West, the self-appointed poet spokesman will al–
ways be too much of a poet; there will always be something amateurish
about him. Again, this is so because of the fundamental difference be–
tween the Eastern and the Western, the ethical and the pragmatic senses
of the very word "politics." For the poet from Eastern Europe, politics
is a sort of crusade any decent human being is obliged to join, even ifhe
would rather stay home or if he is essentially non-militant. When, how–
ever, the poet crusader overcomes misgivings and accepts his mission, he is
immediately brought down to earth - not so much by hostile infidels as
by his own feeling of incompetence. His message speaks of ethical values:
liberty, dignity, truth. But the questions he hears deal with the prosaic
matters of economics, commerce, and business opportunities - things he
may not have the faintest notion of. Is there any area of politics, in its
complexity of meanings, within which the Eastern European poet who
lives in the West can feel competent about by virtue alone of being a
poet? Is there any community for which he may speak without betraying
the principles of his craft? Answering from my personal feelings, I would
say that throughout the eighties, the only moments in all of my political
engagements when I didn't feel as if I were doing someone else's job, as
if I would be better off sitting at my desk working on a poem, were
those moments when I wrote or spoke about something that the poet
can address better than any politician or political scientist. In the area of
