Political fascism is physically brutal.
Let me, then, analyze Gass's comment more fully. Readers already familiar with Gass's work know that, for him, the first potential bondage, or tyranny, is to be found in words which, by definition, lie, or mislead because they never fully express the concept or thing they are meant to convey. Lyric poetry, by its own generic definition, claims to represent accurately and authentically the emotional experiential facets of Being, of being human. It seems to me, then, that if fiction is entirely artifice, then poetry, fiction's generic opposite, is the one genre that admits its own artifice in order the better to tell the truth and break out of the formalist frame. The genre that comes closest to the conceptual of all the genres available, I would argue, is lyric poetry.