Can Poetry Save a Nation?

Editor's Note

The woke regime, like any revolutionary regime, can only succeed by encouraging a great many Americans to abandon their own nation: to rebuke or forget its history, its traditions, the very identity it renders to them. David Goldman argues, however, that our national identity is indelible, bound up in our everyday speech and thus in the very thing that makes us human. Goldman looks to Hungary and Israel as two modern nations that have embraced their poetic traditions and, at the same time, staved off the great decline sweeping across the West.

In a globalized world, why should anyone want to be German, French, Spanish, or Hungarian? “None of the above” isn’t a full-credit answer to the question of national identity. This is the great existential question for the West. Nations are the carriers of cultural continuity. Without the hope that future generations will speak our language, remember our struggles, understand our prayers, and continue our labors, we lose our motivation to bring children into the world. There exists a lullaby in Esperanto, but it has never put a baby to sleep. Only national language embedded in a national culture can provide a bridge between past, present, and future.

Poetry plays an irreplaceable role in the enlivenment of the past and the evocation of the future — not just the national classics, but the less pretentious efforts of popular poets. Molière’s bourgeois gentleman was surprised to learn that he had been speaking prose all his life. The precise opposite is the case: Wittingly or not, we cannot help but speak poetry. Every national language inherits unique poetic expressiveness from its particular tradition. The great poets, and even popular poets on occasion, refine and elevate the poetic content of everyday language. That explains why poetry resonates so powerfully: It awakens a dimension of our thought that lies dormant in everyday speech and makes us conscious of our identity.

Jewish national identity by any objective measure has had a special perdurance during the past eight decades. Not only did the Jews revive a national state defunct for more than two thousand years and restore Hebrew as a spoken language: Israel is the only high-income nation with a fertility rate well above replacement. A popular patriotic song, “Jerusalem of Gold,” illustrates the evocative power of poetry as a bearer of national identity. Before discussing the song, it’s helpful to consider how language and identity depend on poetry.

It doesn’t take a village to raise a child; it takes a nation. It is a naïve assumption that nations are simple agglomerations of kinship groups; families form clans, clans form tribes, and tribes form nations. Again, the opposite is true: Families and clans are too fragile to sustain the vicissitudes of time. The tribes of pre-history spoke perhaps 150,000 languages, the vast majority of which have vanished without trace. A living remnant of pre-history is Papua New Guinea, whose even million people still speak over 800 tongues. More than a hundred of these are at risk of extinction.

The languages of modern Europe, by contrast, were created by the first national states under the tutelage of the Catholic Church, which civilized the barbarian invaders who inherited the ruins of the Roman Empire: St. Isidore of Seville, St. Gregory of Tours, St. Stephen of Hungary, Sts. Cyril and Methodius. Ancient Israel is the first nation, that is, the first political entity to insist that all speakers of the same language and worshippers of the same God must adhere to the same polity; no Greek proposed such a thing until Isocrates, a thousand years after the Exodus. The Church took the Davidic Kingdom as the exemplar for Catholic monarchs.

Nationhood and religion in Europe are of one substance. That had tragic consequences in the great religious and national wars from 1618 to 1945. But the tragedy was not inevitable. Neither is its repetition. Europe’s great tragedy today is the erosion of identity. 

At constant fertility of around 1.5 children per female, Europe’s working-age population will fall to 264 million by the end of the century from 442 million today, and every ten working-age Europeans will support seven retirees versus three today. The ratio of retirees to working-age Americans will rise from 3:1 to 6:1. As recently as 2006, America’s fertility rate stood at the replacement level of 2.1; by 2023 it had fallen to just 1.6, the same as in Europe.

The West is willing itself out of existence. More than half of Gen Z and millennials say they do not plan to have children, which suggests that U.S. and European fertility rates will fall even further. 

There is no greater tragedy for humankind than the extinction of a nation. Every nation has a distinct Volksgeist, or national spirit, Hegel averred. This becomes clear when we consider the distinctly poetic content of national languages. The philosophers of language aren’t much help. Their concern is language in general; ours is what makes one language unique to a particular people. Philosophers quarrel over whether names are arbitrary collections of objects chosen for convenience (nominalism), or whether they reflect an underlying reality that assigns the objects of the same name to an instantiated universal (realism). The most prominent debate on the nature of language addressed the nature of names, with the logician Saul Kripke on one side and Bertrand Russell on the other. This controversy is of little consequence to us, because we want to know how language expresses change and stasis, progress and continuity, past and future. That is, we want to know about verbs. Logic is enough for nouns; to make sense of verbs, we require poetry. 

Every language has a distinct mode of thought, not only because verb conjugations, declensions, and sentence structure differ among them, but because our ability to form concepts depends on metaphors that derive from unique linguistic histories embedded in the living experience of their speakers. It is impossible to think except by the use of language.

The metaphors we take for granted in the daily employment of language come down to us by tradition. The speakers of a language agree on the use of certain metaphors to some extent because they were taught to do so by their great writers of the past, but the popular idiom has an inventiveness of its own. Leibniz first observed that it is hard to express causal relations in language except by reference to spatial or temporal relations. I can put you up, or put you down, or put you off, or put you on; I can put across a sales pitch or put in a good word. There is no predetermined rule by which a preposition alters the meaning of a simple verb like “put,” but we get the joke immediately. German does the same thing, but with different outcomes: To “set aside” means one thing in English, but its German cognate “beisetzen” means to bury a corpse. This is true in Romance languages as well, except that the combinations are ossified (“translate” = Übersetzen, literally, to put over). 

Verb-preposition combinations abound in the Indo-European languages. Biblical Hebrew transforms the verb itself to distinguish different kinds of action, with several conjugations of reflexive action. פָּלַל (palal) means to mediate, judge, or intercede; the reflexive hithpael form לְהִתְפַּלֵּל, literally to judge oneself, is the Hebrew word “to pray.” Causation rather than spatial analogy in Hebrew governs verb modification.

These simple examples illustrate that language is built up around metaphor, and that these metaphors stem from poetic association rather than simple logic. Every national language has distinct metaphors that are not predetermined logically but invented by the speakers of the language and inherited by their descendants. There is no humanity without language, and no language without nation. 

Speakers of a language employ metaphors coined in the distant past without reflection. Reflective poetry that connects the past to the present, by contrast, evokes a self-conscious sense of national identity, that is, our distinct humanity, that which makes us human in a specific way in our own specific circumstances. Living poetry, that is, poetry that recreates the past for every new generation, is the currency of nationhood.

The past often is murky. The origin of many of the European nations is hidden in myth, veiled by the mists of time. One alternative for national poetry is to appropriate the history of Israel. Until very recently, Italy’s de facto national hymn was the chorus “Va Pensiero” from Verdi’s Nabucco, with its paraphrase of Psalm 137 (“By the waters of Babylon…we wept when we remembered Zion. We hung our harps upon the willows”). Britain’s most popular national hymn is Blake’s “Jerusalem” (“And did those feet in ancient times walk upon England’s mountains green / And was the holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen!”). Americans also refer to the Hebrew Bible; our “Battle Hymn” begins with reference to the grapes of wrath, Isaiah’s terrible image of God trampling the nations in a wine vat, His garments soaked in their blood.

A noteworthy example of a modern poem with ancient adumbrations that was embraced by the popular culture is Naomi Shemer’s 1967 “Jerusalem of Gold,” with its refrain: “I am a lyre for all of your songs.” This unpretentious folk-song meditation on the beauty and sanctity of Jerusalem as well as its desolation adapts the best-known line of the greatest Hebrew medieval poet, Yehuda Halevi. 

Its last verse declares:

But when I come to sing to you

And weave you garlands,

I am the littlest of your children

And the last of your poets,

For your name burns the lips

Like a seraph’s kiss –

Let me not forget thee, Jerusalem,

Who are all of gold.

The poet is a vessel for all of Jerusalem’s songs — the Psalms and the visions of the Prophets. But her evocation brings them to life and revives the ancient city. The images are drawn from Scripture, but their adaptation is fresh. Shemer’s song became an unlikely anthem during the Six-Day War: a gentle, self-abnegating reflection on the past rather than a martial declaration.

Shemer’s song is nearly sixty years old. There have been few recent attempts to evoke the national past in a popular idiom. One exceptional effort came last year from Hungarian composer Bálazs Havasi, who debuted a “Hungarian Symphony”  featuring the recitation of four texts  by Hungary’s national poet Sándor Petőfi, including the National Song (“Nemzeti dal”), the anthem of the country’s 1848 revolution. Our ancestors cannot rest quietly in their graves while their nation remains enslaved, Petőfi wrote. This is unabashedly patriotic stadium music, blending spoken word and spectacle. It concluded with a marching display of the country’s national colors. The idiom mixes classical and pop elements with panache. Whether it will stand the test of time remains to be seen, but its rapturous reception illustrates the power of poetry to unite the present with the past.

Hungary, to be sure, is a special case. It devotes nearly a tenth of its federal budget to family support and has made considerable progress in reversing the demographic decline that afflicted all of Europe. It has refused to admit large numbers of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa in order to preserve its unique culture, and its government is proudly patriotic and Christian. By no coincidence, it is Israel’s best friend in Europe; Hungary views Israel’s demographic and economic success with admiration and in some ways would like to emulate it. It’s hard to imagine a work like the “Hungarian Symphony” in Germany, France, or England. Even so, it is an exception that proves the rule.