And the People Stayed Home

Literary responses to epidemic diseases have a long history. The bubonic plague, which intermittently distraught Europe for centuries, inspired such literary classics as Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (14th-century Italy), Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (18th-century work about the historical 1665 outbreak in England), and Albert Camus’s The Plague (20th-century French novel about a fictional outbreak in Algeria). In all these texts, and many others, writing about a deadly infectious disease is an occasion to explore both fragility and resilience as key components of the human condition. In the face of a biological force that makes individual human existence and agency appear puny and feeble, the human species nonetheless find ways to fight back and overcome the challenge.

The literature of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)—a very different but equally deadly pandemic—is another example of artistic response to a global calamity caused by an infectious disease. Numerous works of fiction, drama, and poetry describe the loss, fear, and despair brought on by AIDS, as well as the solidarity, courage, perseverance, survival, commemoration, and transformation that ensued.

“And the People Stayed Home” belongs to this tradition of disease-inspired literature. Many other poets felt the urge to promptly react to COVID-19, which is amply illustrated in a collection of such poems, Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic (edited by Alice Quinn). The content of the book, comprising over 100 poems, was finalized by May 2020—less than six months after the virus was discovered. The poems are diverse in tone and emphasis, but the collection as a whole is a testimony to the human need to use poetry as a way to make sense of an unexpected and unprecedented situation, to share a wide range of feelings, and to express faith in recovery and renewal.