"Political" poems

Lax at St. Bonaventure University, late 1940s

"Anyone can produce poems concerned with the world, and what to think about the world, and what can we do about the things in the world.  But to say that someone who writes about what can we do about things is talking in a "political" way is only a way of labeling.  I'm sure there are many entries in my journals in which I ask myself what can we do about the world. 

"Our idea with PAX was to take pieces and put them in order; a "harmony of order" as St. Thomas said.  Getting things in order is a good thing.  As far as art goes,  I think that beauty is the tranquility of order.  With PAX, what we thought that we should do is have artists working for peace, not by making peace posters, but by making the best art they could, and by letting us publish it, and by letting the world see what harmony and beauty there can be in the world when people are working on art instead of on war.  I think that was the essential idea about PAX.  And, in general, people did contribute, and they contributed with very good heart.  I think there were eighteen issues of it.   We planned it all in Paris.  But we weren't really able to publish it until JUBILEE began, and then Ed Rice let me do it.  Berhard Moosbrugger was in on the plan from the beginning, and he liked it too."

- Robert Lax from an interview with Sigrid Hauff on Patmos, September 1999