Of course, for writers like Dante, banishment or marginalization is not a choice, but subsequently taking one’s poetic stance on the periphery is. Take the case of John Clare. The enclosure act of 1832 literally destroyed his way of life, tearing up trees, damming brooks, fencing off lands in what had been for him an Edenic nature. As a poor migrant worker, he was literally fenced out of a livelihood. As the “Northhamptonshire peasant Poet,” as he came to be known, he worked in nearly total oblivion, his work was damned and ridiculed until very recently, and he became as isolated as his beloved villages, finally going mad in his later years. Literally and poetically on the periphery, he nonetheless created in his poems the ideal central world, a vision that acknowledged the oppressive forces yet transcended them. Literally and poetically on the periphery, he nonetheless created in his poems the ideal central world, a vision that acknowledged the oppressive forces yet transcended them. So many of his poems deal with creating centers on the far circumference, and many of these deal with various animals who become emblems for Clare’s own oppressed life: the fox who escapes a shepherd and dog by retreating to a far den, the elusive hedgehog, the numerous poems about protective nests, and even in his journals the sense of the asylum as its own central world. Even one of his more anthologized poems, the badger, describes in the end how the animal, even when half-domesticated and so displaced from its natural habitat, will retreat when pressed, “And runs away from the noise in hollow trees / Burnt by the boys to get a swarm of bees.” It is precisely because Clare’s voice speaks to us from the margins, speaks to a center from the circumference, that it is so unique, offering us an incredibly accurate picture of the breakdown of rural society and values that, say, Wordsworth’s sublime visions often overlook. Self-educated, he made a poetic tradition and a uniquely powerful voice for truth that would have been impossible had he taken the usual paths for a poet of his day.

This is the basis of a worry among Central European poets today, now that so many of the repressive regimes have fallen, because resistance to them was a motivating factor among writers and readers. This worry takes the form of a question: what is left to write against and about, and for whom? The question does not mean to suggest that all writing was or should be political, but that the expression of an individual, to be an individual expression, must run counter to an official party line — whether that party is political, moral, sociological, racial or any of the many categories that seem to try to govern our lives.

What these poets are discovering is that the party line is not just the communist party line, but now the party line of capitalism that now brings with it a materialism which must be countered with an even more spiritualist, or transcendental perspective than was taken against the so-called people’s parties. These poets have always seen the poet as an outsider, as marginalized, as or disenfranchised in some way, and regarded poetry as a means of gaining some center for the self. In fact, the underlying premise might be that unless the poet is writing directly or indirectly against the gain of some power structure, the writing will wither and die: to do anything else is to become part of the power structure or problem. Here is a poem by the Bulgarian poet, Blaga Dimitrova, entitled “Bulgarian Woman From The Old Days”:^[1]

The woman’s action is a kind of making do, a kind of nest building reminiscent of the nests of Clare, but here Dimitrova warns against this gesture, and indeed every such poetic gesture has its own “traps.” The difficulty is that the woman has let her narrow concern with the everyday overshadow the larger political threat from the totalitarian communist state. In short, the old woman’s nest building, without a reference to any center of power, is insufficient. The quotidian images and objects, seemingly innocent clothes and laundry, become redefined here as threats; in Dimitrova’s vision these everyday objects must be reexamined. Indeed the state itself wants to confine the citizen’s concerns to the realm of laundry, and in the post-communist era the capitalist society would also like to confine the citizen’s concerns to such material nestings. The poet, for Dimitrova, as for so many Central European poets, must remake the symbols and images of the day that the political or economic or social censors have attempted to control.