Seamus Heaney in 1971. Photograph: Jack McManus
Among the most impressive moments for me of yesterday’s heartening stream of events was President-Elect Joe Biden’s reference to a poem by Seamus Heaney. Called “The Cure at Troy,” it is Heaney’s verse adaptation of Sophocles’ play, Philoctetes.
The two lines he quoted come after “No poem, play or song/can right a wrong.” Nevertheless, “Once in a lifetime/hope and history rise up.”
It is this moment, long-awaited with fear and impatience, we are witnessing today. Joe Biden has been seasoned by personal tragedy. He has also been seasoned by forty years in Washington, a “practical politician,” as one commentator called him. This is not always taken, today, as a compliment. But who governing with a divided Congress—unless Democrats gain two Georgia seats in January—can accomplish anything except with the most complex sense of what is practical—a sense, to be effective, always based on a moral vision?
Poetry is essential to that vision, in my view, the only art form complex enough to deal with the contradictions of human nature. And yet, for three or four generations, poetry has fallen out of favor (along with short stories), because as readers we tend to listen to the form of practicality preached and practiced by the big commercial publishers: poetry doesn’t sell. But what is that to us readers as long as poetry continues to be published by estimable non-profit small publishers?
If we buy the argument that poetry doesn’t sell as a reason to shun buying and reading it, we are following a perverse trend that says anything that does not sell does not deserve to exist. We have seen the devastating results in the past four years.
Without poetry, we are reduced to the limitations of contemporary fiction, shallowly rooted journalism, and the stuff we hear and see on television. This will not avail us in times of crisis, and we always face crises, both personal and national.
Biden has said that he will govern the entire country, trying to enlist the support of his adversary’s sometimes unsavory supporters. This is essential. In this Greek play, written 2400 years ago, the son of Achilles is persuaded to a dishonorable act with what is presented as an honorable outcome: “the lie is our only salvation.” For the past four years we have been persuaded, at least partially, that the lie is our only salvation, more palatable than the truth about our dreadful dilemmas. It is this clash of what a commentator calls “irreconcilable… world views” that the play seeks to solve, a solution that Heaney’s poem celebrates.
One of our dreadful dilemmas is rooted in the near-collapses of our public education system that began after the Supreme Court ordered desegregation of our schools. Many white parents fled, many black parents were dismayed by the chaos of those first years, by busing, and by the withering of public funds. Yet a democracy without a flourishing public school system will not educate an electorate to recognize truth, subtlety, and compromise.
The increasing elitism of the universities that are considered the top of the educational pyramid is a problem that no one addresses. No matter the scholarships, the abandonment of quotas, the support for non-traditional students, these universities cannot serve students who have never been given the basic tools, above all, the ability to concentrate in the midst of multiple distractions.
Somewhere along the way, our respect for education collapsed. No one quotes poetry and few read it, no one refers to the Greeks, and few read their writing, despite the fact that these works have survived for two or more millennia. My mother, in the midst of overwhelming personal tragedies, turned for comfort to a world view based on “The tears in things”—lacrimae rerum, Book one, line 462—from the Aeneid by the Roman poet Virgil who lived in the first century before the birth of Christ. The line helped her to overcome self-pity and to turn outward to a world where there has always been, and always will be, suffering.
It is the only way.
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