Poetry and Ideology by Natália Correia

The characteristic dynamics of the poetic mentality always sound like isms with which political ideologies dispute the great panaceas for people’s precarious lives. The starting points of the ideological position and the poetic vision are radically opposed. The ideological process develops from a concept of human inferiority, proposing to lead the growth of humanity according to a set of ideas suited to a programmed evolution. We are in the domain of a paternalistic praxis, the conception of the realization of man within a principle of legality. The poetic attitude presupposes in its origin the belief in humanity’s adulthood, a natural and lost perfection that can be found again because it is a natural good. The verification in each present moment of the deviation from natural perfection dictates the unhappy conscience, the animosity for rules, and the unease with time that shapes poetic activity in one way or another. It’s a round universe, a movement that finds its beginning again at the end. The ideological position can, therefore, be defined as a linear interpretation of human destiny, which, in the poetic mindset, takes on a circular configuration.

There is, however, a moment when, in its dynamics, its attitude intersects with ideological action. This happens when both coincide in the project to change man’s situation, even collaborating in a lively attack on the structures that resist this change. It is within the framework of this conjunction that Miaskovsky’s pamphleteering poetry erupts, the heated words of a new social situation from which ideological theory deduces a positive change in man.

But ideology is an intellectual structure, subject only to its laws. The predominant affection of poetic ideologies is to extinguish their flame in the slow combustion of a politicism that demands that the material and spiritual life of the individual be subject to the influence of the state. This statism, in which the purest intentions of ideological revolutions rot, breaks the poet’s pact with the ideologist because the time has come for the poetic continuum that assumes the perpetual human revolution to recognize the striking contrast between what ideology promises and what it delivers. This overtaking of the social revolution by the human revolution justifies – placing ourselves in the same area that claims Mayakovsky’s ideological enthusiasm – the discordant voices of Pasternak and Akhmatova. In differentiating their respective attitudes, Mayakovsky and Pasternak also observe the ethics presupposed in the poetic act. Both identify themselves in the timeliness of their response to the call of poetic sympathy for man, the substantial bond that connects them. It is the conditions that stimulate their reactions that are different.

The famous text by Benjamin Péret, “Le Desbonneur des Poètes“, comes to mind in this context. It raises the delicate problem of poetic commitment to a historical circumstance in which the complete and universal meaning that the concept of freedom assumes in the context of the poetic revolution is deteriorating.

    The freedoms a political ideology promises are based on the paternalistic assumption of the legitimacy of administration that man lacks when he is incapable of taking responsibility for his freedom. This means that the ideological opposition focuses precisely on building a physiognomy of man that it takes as definitive and in which poetry, which starts from the belief in man’s natural perfection, recognizes a mistake and consequently considers the institutions authorized on this basis to be mistaken. It is in the sense of persistently unmasking the lure of freedoms that stabilizes the equivocation, the deviation from total freedom, that Benjamin Péret defines the honor of the poet. The poet dishonors himself whenever his poetry is politicized, allows himself to be seduced by the fallacy of ideologies, or makes concessions to the promise of freedoms that block the path to original liberty. But this point of view, which rigorously translates the particularity of the poetic vision, sins in its rigor since it demands a purely essentialist attitude from the poet, showing less appreciation for the fact that the human poet is involved in the here and now, where ideological corrections and emergencies inevitably occur.

     The link, however fortuitous, of poetic consciousness with these emergencies is, therefore, an imposition of the two-dimensional nature of the poet: the man who, while assuming the universal, the timeless, and the essential, is simultaneously immersed in the accidental, the existential and, therefore, in the circumstances of his time.

Where the poetic position can become corrupted and lose meaning is in its programmatic subjection to ideology mummified in politicism. This is when the poet abandons the essential attitude, the belief in the natural community, which implies the perfection of man, and exchanges it for the acceptance of political society based on man’s inferiority.

     We, therefore, believe we can correct Benjamin Peret’s valuable but extremist conception of the honorable poet. Indeed, the poet’s fundamental commitment to the original meaning of poetry impels him to fight for the total liberation of man and to disbelieve in those freedoms which, from a political, economic, and social point of view, conceal new chains. But it’s equally valid that he can’t ignore the exaltation that societies experience in the face of ideological promises that come to move consciences paralyzed by static politicism. But poetic intelligence recognizes in these promises the germ of tomorrow’s oppressions. And that’s why it’s inevitable that the poet blames the politicism that triggered the ideological reaction with which he agreed. He holds it responsible for the poetic dishonor it commits by betraying the human revolution that institutes the poetic act when it becomes an advertisement for ideological programs that, even in their broadest scope, have man’s inferiority as their primary concept.

Translated by Diniz Borges, curator for the Cátedra Natália Correia at PBBI-Fresno State.

Natália Correia (1969). «O poeta e o mundo”, “Poesia e Ideologia». Diário de Notícias, 7 de Agosto, pp. 17-18.

A weekly segment as part of the Cátedra Natália Correia from PBBI-Fresno State to commemorate the poet’s centennial.