Leonard Cohen once called himself “a ninth-rate practitioner in a great tradition” but he’ll be remembered as more than that. His best lines will remain, subtle and tough like a poacher’s snares to pull tight the knot of pleasure and apprehension around readers who stumble into them long after his obituaries are forgotten. That is something of what it means to be part of a tradition: to strike up new conversations even when you’re dead. Memory and poetry are closely entwined. Poems live in memory or not at all and, while they do, they help to shape the people who remember them.
This has been a year, indeed a week, that will be grimly remembered for decades, but it is also a year in which we remember many horrors of the past. The slaughter at the Bataclan nightclub in Paris was exactly a year ago. A concert by Sting will commemorate this and at the same time try to change its meaning and show that music can’t be permanently silenced with gunfire.
The incomparably greater slaughter of the first world war (or the war to end all wars, as the optimists named it) was commemorated today. Many of the British memories of that war now come through poetry and especially the fierce and bitter eloquence of Wilfred Owen. If any 10 words could be said to have changed the way the British think about war and patriotism, they would be Owen’s: “The old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”
This was a first-rate operator at work in a great tradition, taking the ennobling sentiment of the Latin poet Horace and jamming it into the mouth of a man dying from poison gas so that no one who read it could ever think so lightly that it was “the sweet and right thing” to die for their country. The sweetness, at least, would never taste the same.
Horace can argue back, in the mouths of his later admirers. That’s what tradition means: it is an endless conversational argument with the dead, to which both parties bring only the things they have worth saying. Leonard Cohen argued with dead monks, with Jesus, and with his own ancestors, as well as with all the poets he had read. The disciplines he accepted were moral as well as aesthetic.
Ernest Hemingway described courage as grace under pressure, but this is also the condition of language when it’s compressed into poetry. Poetry will do more than almost any other art to strengthen and console us in the face of catastrophe, not with uplift, nor with rhetoric, but with honesty and courage, and with the knowledge that others before us have faced terrible futures with grace.
