THE BRUISED cultural feelings of Washington received a fillip of sorts during the week of April 17, when twenty-eight writers and artists from eleven countries assembled for an annual congress sponsored by the capital’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and financed by the Ford Foundation. The roster included Italian Nobel-Prize poet Salvatore Quasimodo, American poets Richard Eberhart, Stanley Kunitz and Allen Tate, England’s critic-poet Sir Herbert Read and potter Bernard Leach, French poet Yves Bonnefoy and Brazilian novelist Erico Verissimo. Keeping close to a prepared schedule, they ate, drank and partied together, delivered lectures, plunged into panel discussions, declaimed poetry and exchanged views on the theme of the congress — the status of the artist. Leach even potted. While these activities did not tear headlines from the other major events of the week (the convening of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the opening of the Washington Senators’ annual drive to soar higher than eighth place), enough occurred to make Washington cultural buffs puff out their chests and, for at least a week, forget Howard Taubman.

For four months now, the capital has lived under the shadow of Taubman, music critic of The New York Times, who wrote an article last December 27 with a question for a title. “In Culture,” it asked, “Is Washington a Hick Town?” Taubman’s answer clearly was yes. Putting aside comparisons with London, Paris,; Moscow or Rome, the critic suggested that Washington does not measure up even to Brussels or, for that matter, a provincial town like Tiflis in Russia. While finding Washington’s record in the plastic and graphic arts quite satisfactory, Taubman described its performance in music as variable, in the dance as negligible and in theatre as poor. As an example of the capital’s attitude, the critic noted that while designers have prepared detailed plans for a new, stately National Culture Center, few planners have bothered to discuss who and what will fill it.

Taubman’s article contained the most perceptive analysis of Washington cultural life recently published and should have prompted residents to read it closely and brood. But rather than brood, the city has chosen to snarl, and few columnists, lecturers and partygoers miss an opportunity these days to snatch at the tidbits of Washington culture, hold them high and wave them angrily toward Taubman. The Congress of Writers and Artists was that kind of tidbit, and I attended a couple of public sessions to see for myself if, perhaps, Washington had a much more exciting cultural life than Taubman imagined.

ONE EVENING 400 others and I filled a bit less than half of the Interior Department auditorium to hear Eberhart, Leach, Read, Tate, Verissimo and British critic Robert Conquest discuss the status of the artist. It became apparent, after a while, that the panelists were bored with their status and one another. Eberhart seemed to speak for everyone when he suggested that the American artist may be using up too much energy searching for status. “The world is a place of struggle,” Eberhart said, “and the spirit of man will not be put down by obstacles.” And Tate clinched the argument by noting that the status of the artist cannot be too bad if foundations and the State Department continually spend money shipping them about the world to talk to one another. “Someone once called me an international congress bum,” Tite said, chuckling at his sponsors.

The evening livened only when Herbert Read discussed his tour of Communist China last fall and reported dispassionately on his interviews with Chinese writers and artists. The audience and his fellow panelists leaned forward to catch every word as Read described the physical status of Chinese writers (he was struck by their elegance, well-being and high incomes) and then recounted the gist of his conversations with them on their spiritual status. He had asked the leaders of the Chinese Writers Union if Mao’s “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom” policy still continued for writers. He was assured there had been no change although, the writers added, “naturally the blossoms were Socialist blossoms and must not be choked by noxious weeds.” Read then asked if Doctor Zhivago had been published in China. His question first evoked a negative reply, then an embarrassed flurry of whispers, and finally an admission that the book had been published in a limited edition and circulated among members of the Writers Union. After reading the novel, the union, which operates a publishing house, decided not to issue it for general circulation. Wasn’t this censorship? Read asked. No, he was told, any publishing house has the right to turn down a manuscript. Read noted that their replies resembled doublethink but their actions actually were not too different from those of Roman Catholic bishops who refuse the imprimatur to anything the Church considers evil.

Read also provided one of the few live moments at a festival of poetry two nights later. He, Bonnefoy, Kunitz, Tate and Quasimodo read some of their poetry to an Interior Department audience that now had dwindled to 250. Here I must confess to a prejudice, for I have never felt that poets reading their own poetry provide any new insights. But, at the festival, both Read and Quasimodo offered something new and different, at least for me, and my interest perked up during their turns. The rest of the audience, perhaps with the same prejudice, also awakened at the same times I did.

Read’s contribution was a few abstract poems, which he insisted were not nonsense, but had significance, at least for him. They consisted of words strung together (“Syntax is the death of poetry,” Read had said in his preface) with no discernible meaning but somehow filled with musical logic. They were short and fun to hear.

Quasimodo, who won the Nobel Prize last year, is little known in this country. A few journals have published individual poems, but the first major translation of his works will be published here this month. The audience, therefore, was treated to an event, a sort of introduction of Quasimodo to America. Bonnefoy, of course, also is little known in the United States, but, not being a Nobel Prize-winner, he was less of an event. Kimon Friar read Quasimodo’s poems in English translation, and then the poet, in a low monotone, read them in Italian. It is difficult to judge a poet by hearing a few of his pieces in translation, but Quasimodo impressed me as a tough-minded Romantic, a lyric poet searching for beauty but not blind to Buchenwald or the poverty of the south of his country. “Poets are not liars,” he says. And he ends a lyric about the Italian south by describing his poem as “a love lament where no love sings.”

Quasimodo and Read stirred the public sessions of the congress by offering something unusual: a new Nobel poet, a report on Red China, a few abstract poems. In short, they made news. But the news they made was meager and somewhat accidental. Perhaps many more exciting things went on at the private sessions of the congress. But I have visions of endless dull talk and endless dull parties. Potter Leach, however, may have been an exception. He spent his mornings in an apron, conducting pottery workshops at Catholic University. The vitality of Leach may underscore the basic fault of the congress. Too much talk and not enough potting. And that may be the trouble with Washington cultural life, too.

STANLEY MEISLER is a wire service newsman now stationed in Washington.