Poetry and Protest

Poetry has also served as a form of protest, resistance, and witness to oppressive political and social systems across the world. The French-language négritude movement was launched in the 1930s by poets Aimé Césaire of Martinique and Léopold Sédar Senghor of what was then French West Africa, and became a rallying point for West African and Caribbean nations challenging French colonial rule. Senghor would subsequently become president of the newly independent country of Senegal. South African poets Es'kia Mphahlele, Dennis Brutus, and Breyten Breytenbach directed their protests against the racist practices of apartheid. Chileans Nicanor Parra and Ariel Dorfman, Nicaraguan Claribel Alegria, and Cuban Herberto Padilla were among those opposing dictatorships and human rights violations in their respective Latin American countries. In Eastern bloc countries poetry was engaged in more subtle forms of resistance. In Poland, Zbigniew Herbert and Wisława Szymborska composed muted, ironic portraits addressing the struggle to hold onto moral independence within a repressive regime, while in the former Yugoslavia, Tomaz Salamun hurled his aggressive and surreal imagery in the face of his would-be censors. In the Soviet Union, Joseph Brodsky and Irina Ratushinskaya were imprisoned for poems that by their independent spirit alone appeared subversive to the Communist regime. These poets sometimes published through the medium of samizdat, self-published works circulated secretly or smuggled abroad. Dorothy Livesay and Earle Birney were among the Canadian poets who published in left-leaning journals as well as elsewhere, and remained important in Canadian poetry through the 1970s. In the United States, Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka, among many others, added their voices to the struggle for civil rights. Daniel Berrigan, W. S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, and Muriel Rukeyser were among a number of poets using their work to protest, overtly or subtly, American involvement in the Vietnam War (1959-1975).