Anti-Hamill:
Wrong-Headed Poets Thwart the Victory of World
Governance and the Civilizing Values of Peace

by Frederick Glaysher

A more misguided and wrong-headed response could not exist. It's so fraught with clichés I hardly know where to start. In general, it's a pity that Sam Hamill, and others who think like him, demonstrate once again that poetry, as defined by them at least, indeed doesn't matter, so complete is their inability to think seriously about the threat represented by Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. Their ridiculous pose of mounting the barricades is really quite contemptible. It is clear that the crowd alluded to by Mr. Hamill summons poetry to their own radical distortions and agendas, achieving only a further marginalization of an art that has all too often, among some, lost allegiance to the civilizing values of peace, which require defense never more so than now.

Far from "the conscience of our culture," such poets have no sense of history and the deep obligations of our country, to ourselves and to the world, which the burden of power lays upon us at this juncture. President Bush is right to call the United Nations to live up to its founding Charter, to be a common refuge of defense, "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war," not merely consultation, reduced to babel. At this time of national and international crisis, poets who betray their nation, art, and humanity merit no audience at The White House.

For a different view of the issues involved, I invite Big City Lit's readers to consider my essay, "The Victory of World Governance." [Link]

The Middle Ages witnessed the periodic devastation of vast areas of territory for hundreds of years before the notion arose that social cohesion and order should take precedence over local ambitions, sovereignty, and religious belief. Thus the Magna Carta in 1215 and the first free European commune in Florence in 1266 marked significant steps toward formation of the nation-states that began to appear around 1500.  . . .

Then shall the nations learn, as Jean Monnet wrote, "to live together under common rules and institutions freely arrived at." Then shall dawn that long awaited reconciliation of the tensions that first advanced themselves in the Renaissance and that have plagued civilization ever since. Then shall arise that glorious civilization animating the hopes of all peoples from the earliest days of recorded history.

[The views regarding Poets Against the War expressed by this writer
are presented here in the interest of journalistic balance.—Eds.]