THE PEN AND THE SWORD

	April 5, 1999
	Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate of the United States, contemplates war.

ROBERT PINSKY: With armed conflict and suffering and evidence of atrocity in the news this April, which is also poetry month, an old question emerges again: What use or relevance does poetry have in the face of large-scale political disaster or evil? The Polish poet, Ceslav Milos, who survived the Nazi occupation of Poland, has said that in those days even the most tinted person by carrying in a pocket some poetry in the Polish language could register a small, stubborn particle of resistance. And in his poem "Incantation" Milos gives a bold, resonating answer to the question of poetry's significance. As the title "Incantation" suggests, the poem is a kind of prayer, less a description of the world as it is at any moment than the world as it will be or as it is at some ultimate core. Here is the poem in an English version that I made with the author. INCANTATION (Czeslaw Milosz) Human reason is beautiful and invincible. No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, No sentence of banishment can prevail against it. It establishes the universal ideas in language, And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice With capital letters, lie and oppression with small. It puts what should be above things as they are, It is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope. It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master, Giving us the estate of the world to manage. It saves austere and transparent phrases From the filthy discord of tortured words. It says that everything is new under the sun, Opens the congealed fist of the past. Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia And poetry, her ally in the service of the good. As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth, The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo, Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit, Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction. --Czeslaw Milosz, trans. Robert Pinsky & the author