Harmonium in a Time of War: Stevens and Contemporary Ukrainian Poets

Harmonium in a Time of War: Stevens and Contemporary Ukrainian Poets Kathryn Mudgett You do not know the things that are taught by him who falls. I do know. —Eugène Lemercier, letter of October 15, 1914 IntroductIon: RegardIng the PaIn of Others IS IT POSSIBLE to convey the experience of war to others through language? Those of us who have regarded war from a distance, from a safe country, or city, or home, are not privy to the experience of those in war zones, as are soldiers, military support staff, or civilians, to whom war comes expectedly through engagement with the enemy or unexpectedly through an incendiary device or unprovoked attack. To suggest we can imagine their pain or fear is to trivialize their lived experience. Yet war can affect our psyche as well, even if we remain observers from afar. Susan Sontag has called “Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country . . . a quintessential modern experience.” Our access to conflicts through digital, social, and broadcast media allows us real-time tracking of events in other hemispheres and time zones: “Wars are now also living room sights and sounds” (18). Our psychic proximity to war began with the early modern period itself, what Sontag calls the “era of shock . . . in 1914.” Language suddenly seemed incapable of conveying the horrors of the trenches: “The nightmare of suicidally lethal military engagement from which the warring countries were unable to extricate themselves . . . seemed to many to have exceeded the capacity of words to describe” (25). Philip Larkin, born four years after the end of World War I, memorialized the psychological break with our past relationship to war in “MCMXIV.” As British men wait “patiently” in “long uneven lines” to sign up for war service, “Grinning as if it were all / An August Bank Holiday lark,” the speaker marks the end of their innocent world: “Never such innocence, / Never before or since, / As changed itself to past / Without a word” (Larkin 127). Contrast this with Thomas Hardy’s 1914 poem “Channel Firing,” where God speaks to the dead awakened by “great guns” off-shore: [End Page 210] “It’s gunnery practice out at sea / Just as before you went below; / The world is as it used to be” (285). Perhaps “as it used to be” in its belligerent tendencies, but with a diabolical lethality unknown before. Wallace Stevens felt an ineluctable break with the past even before the outbreak of what was then known as the Great War. He described the decades before the war as a time of “happy oblivion” for many, when “the sea was full of yachts and the yachts were full of millionaires.” This prosperous period “was like a stage-setting that since then has been taken down and trucked away” (CPP 788). When the theater had been “changed / To something else,” Stevens had to “learn the speech of the place,” to “construct a new stage” from which to address his “invisible audience” (CPP 218–19). This task remains so for poets: to find words that will suffice in the time in which they live. War and its destructive force remain central to our time. In an echo of the German philosopher Theodor Adorno’s assertion that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (“Cultural” 34), the Ukrainian poet Anastasia Afanasieva asks, “Can there be poetry after: /. . . / Krasnyi-Luch, Donetsk, Luhansk / After / Sorting bodies in repose from the dying / The hungry from those on a stroll[?]” Listing cities and towns of the Donbas region, all of which have borne the brunt of violence since 2014, the speaker suggests that in the face of war “Poetry devolves [in]to ‘autistic babbling.’” Social communication becomes a struggle: “Impossible to speak of anything else, / Talking becomes impossible” (Maksymchuk and Rosochinsky 17; translated by Kevin Vaughn and Maria Khotimsky). Both Adorno and Afanasieva suggest that deliberative violence against humanity corrodes a society and renders it incapable of responding to barbarism through the restorative language of art. But neither Adorno’s nor Afanasieva’s response to such threats is pat. Adorno offered a clarification of his statement about Auschwitz following years of criticism and misrepresentation: [J]ust...