A Poet of the Atomic Age

As a poet of the post-war period, and a veteran himself, Plutzik devoted much of his work to considering the moral questions raised by the political events of the age. His Guggenheim fellowship application, written late in 1960, describes his ambition of creating a work on the Jewish Holocaust, "the most immense subject for a poem in our time," an attempt which he confessd in the document may well prove too great for him.

"Six million!" he lamented. "Is there such a number? Grief ends beyond one or two or three; beyond that there are only statistics." Perhaps seeking to grant the subject the human scale which as a poet he might better grasp, he anticipated including a section in the poem on the fate of Jews in his own ancestral village in Russia—although uncertain himself of what actually happened, rumors had reached him that all that remained of them was a mass grave left by the Nazis.

Speculating on what the central theme of the finished poem might be, he wrote that his concern lay not with the responsibility for the crime itself, but the memory of men’s "extraordinary capabilities for evil." True to this idea, Plutzik’s introductory section would have had the ghosts of the six million victims appear in the most familiar and mundane of circumstances, "at midday on Main Street"—literally, the crime haunts us as well as its perpetrators.

Plutzik’s admonishment on the human capacity for evil carried a peculiar immediacy at that historical moment, when the massacres of the Second World War were recent memory and the arms race between the United States and Soviet Union threatened yet another slaughter, as unthinkable as the one that had already occurred. The atomic bomb itself provided a thematic focus to much of Plutzik’s poetry and commentary, as the terrible epitome of humanity’s violent instincts.

Draft pages for "Hiroshima," unpublished in Plutzik’s lifetime. One typed page, another written in blue ink. 4pp total.

Typed draft of "Plan for Work" for Plutzik’s application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, dated Oct. 14, 1960. Proposal to undertake a long poem on the Jewish Holocaust of WWII. 6pp.

"And in the 51st Year of that Century, While My Brother Cried in the Trench, While My Enemy Glared from the Cave" (The Collected Poems, 114)

This star is only an augury of the morning,
Gift-bearer of another day.

A wind has brought the musk of thirty fields,
Each like a coin of silver under that sky.

Precious, the soundless breathing of wife and children
In a house on a field lit by the morning star.

A poem which "could be mistaken for no more than a lyric appreciation of the morning light were it not for its title," as Brunner writes in Cold War Poetry, seeing in it the "unstated presence" of the atomic bomb.