Poetry And Politics Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The relationship between politics and poetry predates written poetry with Homer’s critical view of the Trojan War. However, its public policy significance was dormant until Plato theorized the benefits to society of banning poets in the Republic.

Plato was reacting to the unacknowledged yet real authority retained by Homer as offering the only communally accepted version of epiphanic moments in Greek social and political history. Plato goes so far as to describe poetry as “crippling to the mind,” since its persuasive powers rest on the received pleasure of the reader rather than philosophically rigorous renditions of “the truth.”

The view that the poet is the “unacknowledged legislator of society” is borne out of the view that the poet had historically legislated the parameters within which the cultural—and thereby the political—imagination was permitted to function. Humans cannot act rationally before they imagine an action and its consequences within those social parameters. The issue for Plato is that people are vulnerable to influences on their imaginative faculties by a persuasive third party. Such third parties now operate principally through the television or the Internet. However, for most of Western history, poetry remained the most effective genre of imaginative persuasion. The diminution of the influence of poetry has more than superficial consequences for the quality of political imagining, since poetry demands much more engagement than any contemporary media.

Poetry And Political Thought

Direct narrative or analytical approaches are monological in their effect. Their criterion of value is that the singular thesis of the author transmits as cleanly and completely into the mind of the reader as possible. The reader is required only to accept or reject the thesis, not to contemplate consequences other than those that the author or auteur presents. The well-written monological piece delivers all of its insights on the first reading. Considered visually, a monological reader’s experience over time resembles a cylinder, with each reading experience as circular as the previous one. Poetry, on the other hand, is helicoidal, or screwlike, in nature. It assumes that a reader will read a poem several times over a given period of time, and each time the meanings embedded in the poem will become more tightly focused for the reader. As the reader becomes more familiar with the poem, its meaning becomes clearer—eventually resulting in a fine “point” of understanding, resembling the point of a screw.

These meanings do not necessarily correspond to the intentions of the author, since the reader seeks answers to questions that may not have occurred to the author when the poem was written. However, an inspired and sensitive poet was expected to have spoken the truth on any given subject—and even in some cases, such as Dante or John Milton, to have been divinely inspired to do so. Therefore, any political actor could not fail to encounter something of value to them by rereading a poem several times over. Indeed, for the allegorical author, the reader was expected to impose an individual interpretation on the text, beyond the narrow range of clues that the author provided. A medieval reader of Dante, for example, expected to read the Commedia not only at the literal level, but also at the typological, (allegorical), tropological (morally instructive), and perhaps, if the text permitted, at the anagogical level, which is the moment of insight that recognizes the presence of God.

Medieval political allegory was not primarily about finding universally valid answers to politically contingent problems; rather, it intended to illustrate broad aspects of the human drama, allowing an investigator to examine an issue from a multitude of different perspectives. The process is similar to that which one undergoes in appreciating a cubist work of art. While there is a more or less coherent image on the canvas, only by tracing the multiplicity of perspectives and surfaces presented, and then recombining them in the imagination, does one gain a sense of the profound depth of the object studied. One may never gain the full perspective of the artist, but one cannot help becoming more engaged than is possible with a masterful “realist” rendition of an object.

By providing no finality of thought, end position, or conclusion, political poetry presages many of the perspectival and positional insights offered by advocates of postmodern epistemology. Through an ongoing process of contemplation, it allows new and uncertain outcomes to be continuously evaluated and best-case scenarios to be worked out in advance of an actual crisis.

The Place Of Poets In Politics

No one elects poets to their posts, although popular acclaim provides the democratizing limits to their influence. In the nineteenth century, politically attentive poets enjoyed the benefits of a dramatically increased level of literacy among the lower orders, which encouraged them to investigate the romantic allure of individual liberty, universal suffrage, and democratic rights. Included in this democratizing trend were William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats. Although historically the bane of authoritarian regimes, poets are not exclusively prodemocratic in orientation. Modernist poets such as W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and especially Ezra Pound formed a famously antidemocratic collective with some members consciously verging on the fascistic. This tendency likely reflected the twentieth century’s growing popular disinterest in poetry in favor of more visual—and thereby passive—media, returning poetry to the hands of highly educated elites with more rarified political interests. However, in less developed societies, authors continue to threaten authoritarian regimes (e.g.,Václav Havel) and occasionally still die for their trouble (e.g., Ken Saro-Wiwa). In the West, poetry has largely lapsed into the indulgence of self-expression, which negates the broader application Victor Hugo or Robert Browning might once have had.

Bibliography:

Ankersmit, F. R. Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy beyond Fact and Value. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Hollander, Robert. Dante’s Epistle to Cangrande. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Rodney Merrill. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.
Nussbaum, Martha. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
Plato. The Republic. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. New York:Vintage Classics, 1991.
Sanders, Mike. The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defence of Poetry. London: Shelley Press, 2007.

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