Perhaps Laura Bush should have known better. When she invited a group of poets and critics to the White House in February to celebrate American poetry, she counted on a literary crowd acting in a way that would serve literature. As everyone knows, she sharply underestimated the quotient of adolescent self-righteousness in this segment of the population. With the United States poised to rid the world of hideous tyranny in Iraq, it was simply business as usual when Sam Hamill, a poet and publisher, broadcast an email calling on his fellow scribes to boycott the event and organize a series of protests against the impending conflict. It was, as Mr. Hamill explicitly noted, a rerun of the 1960s, a chance to “reconstitute a Poets Against the War movement like the one organized to speak out against the war in Vietnam.”

The little pacifist dramas that erupted on college campuses and elsewhere across the country in ...

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