In every Infant's cry of fear

In every voice, in every ban ("London")

or see, as did the after-all-not-unpolitical Yeats, that:

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.

O when may it suffice?

That is Heaven's part, our part

To murmur name upon name,

As a mother names her child...

MacDonagn and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.   ("Easter 1916")

But our society, of course, never listens, never wants to hear from its poets, choosing to get its "news" from the Rathers, Brokaws, Jenningses and Lehrers of the world--knowing, I suppose, as William Carlos Williams knew, that:

It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there...

Men are, at this very moment, dying for that lack, dying in a highly sophisticated, technological war which, after the already-dimming flush of first success, we have no idea when, or how, will end. And, in closing, it may be worth noting that the only two governments in recent memory that might, indeed, have asked their poets for a war poem at such a time--namely, Salvadore Allende's Chile and Daniel Ortega's Nicaragua--were brought down by the government that is now, with the consent of Congress, asking men, women and children to die in the Persian Gulf.

Michael Blumenthal is the director of Harvard's creative writing program.