The proposal that poetry’s a substitute for war as a source of artistic inspiration relies on the relative aesthetic value of politics to the populations that these notions are applied to. Both Audre Lorde in her essay, “Poetry Is Not A Luxury”, and Walter Benjamin in his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, note considerations which reveal that their discussions run parallel to each other. Benjamin indicates that there’s a beauty in war that illuminates and inspires poets and artists under Fascism, whereas Lorde discusses the concept that poetry itself is this source of illumination (inspiration) for the poet (artist) or woman (human). Lorde presents an anti-fascist (Socialist) argument that posits that aesthetically politicized art is what lends itself to inspiration of an artist in times of institutional dehumanization. This essay will discuss similarities in their discussions which reveal that that cultural or national aesthetic value of politics is a determining factor of whether artists are inspired by war or art depending on the national climate at the time, in which either art or war can be substituted for the other depending on the different situations.
The idea that the pursuit of war in place of the pursuit of art in regards to aesthetic inspiration for artists is a parallelism that was at the center of Benjamin’s understanding through his entire life. At the end of his essay, he referred to the de-attenuated nature of fully-mobilized cultural activity that embodied the aestiticization of war through Fascist politics until such a state that all available resources were dedicated to the notion of “might is right”, in place of cult-based art, was achieved. To elucidate this, Benjamin writes that, “The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.” (Benjamin 243). What he means here, through reverse-implication, is that poetry (art) is just as guilty as war of the same violation in “forcing the masses to their knees”. With poetry, this is through the illuminating effects radiated by a masterpiece poem, or film, whereas with war it’s literal.
Benjamin sets the narrative that the Fascist (political) class used war as its primary aesthetic focus for the proletariat (working, non-political) masses, whereas communists (Marxists) would instead favor the application of aesthetics to art (he discusses print, film, photography, painting, architecture of buildings etc …) which is what he means when he leaves his parting line on war, “This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.” (Benjamin 244). What he means here is that the impact of war, like the impact of art, implies that World Wars 1 & 2 were “masterpieces” of war, whereas the Ethiopian Colonial War referenced in his essay would be “a fine work” of war, and various militaristic skirmishes and the like are equivalent to individual “essays” of war. In comparison, all these examples of war serve as sources of inspiration for the “artist” that romanticized the notion when he quoted Marinetti in saying, “War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with fiery orchids of machine guns…” (Benjamin 243). This quote is important because it proposes that war itself becomes the source of illumination for these aesthetic notions that would find their way into an artists art apart from the war. During the war, the “art” itself became tanks, new armaments, military formations, and the other various outcomes of war as a direct consequence of it.
War, for the Fascist Benjamin writes of, is the same source of illumination that Lorde indicates poetry is for women (by extension this means “proletariats” using Benjamin’s term, in referring to the non-political working class). In Lorde’s “Poetry Is Not A Luxury”, she says, “This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are – until the poem – nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.” (Lorde, 1977, para. 1). Here, she says that the poem comes before the ideas that inspire the artist. For the sake of this comparison of illuminations of artists to Benjamin’s work, let’s replace notions of “poetry” in this previous sentence from Lorde with those of “war”, as if Benjamin’s Fascist wrote Lorde’s essay. The resulting sentence becomes, “This is war as illumination, for it is through war that we give name to those ideas which are – until the war – nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.” The importance of doing this shows exactly how similar the line of thought between these two authors was. Anywhere Benjamin refers to war in his writing, one could replace all notions of war with poetry. The reverse is true in Lorde’s writing, in that any reference to poetry in her writing, could be swapped with war, leading to different but valid conclusions in the domain of the political effects of each. I’m picking Lorde’s writing as an example because it’s shorter, and her prose is more easily palatable for the sake of making this argument.
When Benjamin says “War is Beautiful…”, he’s implying that the notions of war and art in Lorde’s and his essays are interchangeable concepts, and implies that transforming the title of Lorde’s essay into, “War is Not a Luxury” would adequately describe the notion of war as being a source of illumination for a Fascist, instead of poetry as Lorde wrote (Benjamin 243). Lorde wasn’t a fascist, and thus likely didn’t intend to imply that, “War Is Not a Luxury”, in her writing. However, under the Fascist imperative conveyed by Benjamin, whereby all forms of politics have become aesthetized, in the same way art is aestheticized, when replacing references to poetry in Lorde’s writing with reference instead to war, her entire essay becomes absolutely harrowing, but retains a similar form of argumentation that would agree with Benjamin’s reasoning at the end of his essay.
Consider instead if Lorde had written, “For women, then, war is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into nuts and bolts, and then into tanks and missiles, then into more tangible elimination of enemies. War is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our wars, carved from the rock experience of our daily lives.” instead of, “For women, then, poetry is not a luxury … Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems …” (Lorde, 1977, para. 8). Further rewritten citations aren’t required here to indicate that the verbiage precipitated in Lorde’s essay runs parallel to Benjamin’s conclusions that he left us with and a full rewrite of her essay in the context of war of Lorde’s essay is an exercise outside the scope of this essay.
Her prose style is important to the way she makes the argument because it’s clear that Lorde’s writing as if she’s been personally attacked. Due to this, she writes in the same way one could imagine someone at war, thereby indicating that in place of war, there’s writing such as this to substitute. This would’ve been her natural and expected reaction to the oppression she would’ve been experiencing at the time of writing this, as she lived through the US civil rights movements through the 1960’s and every day at that time would’ve seemed much like a war even in 1977. Whereas Benjamin writes of the field of war, she very much writes as if one were to write from it.
In conclusion, this essay’s covered the parallels between sytlistic thoughts shared between Audre Lorde and Walter Benjamin in their essays that were 40 years apart. The proposal that poetry’s a substitute for war as a source of artistic inspiration relies on their relative aesthetic value in politics to the populations that the notions are applied to. Benjamin indicates that there’s a beauty in war that illuminates and inspires poets and artists under fascist regimes, whereas Lorde discusses the concept that poetry itself is this source of illumination, of inspiration, for the poet or woman (human). In setting these two pieces beside each other, the aesthetic values of art and war become very apparent in that their relative levels of politicization that directly correlate to being sources of inspiration for artists and poets in each authors perspective.
Works Cited
Lorde, Audre. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” Sister Outsider : Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, Trumansburg, NY, 1984. https://web-p-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.bu.edu/bsi/ebookviewer/ebook? sid=6ee66191-f424-414d-a173-ef8224895812%40redis&ppid=Page-__-24&vid=0&format=EK Accessed 29Jul2024
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations, Harcourt, New York, New York, 1968, pp. 219–253. https://bu.leganto.exlibrisgroup.com/leganto/readinglist/citation/39502283480001161/file/ viewer Accessed 29Jul2024