On Politics and Poetry: a dialogue between a poet and a politician

On Politics and Poetry: a dialogue between a poet and a politician

Politician: What’s going on, poet? Are you able to scrabble together a living?

Poet: Rich enough, I suppose, though it’s hard to earn my bread. What about you: still hungry for attention?

Politician: That’s rich, coming from you! I have the best interests of my constituents at heart, and they know it.

Poet: They do?

Politician: Certainly. I’m always listening to their concerns, and addressing them with policy proposals.

Poet: Both the rich and poor? Don’t you pay more attention to those who give you money?

Politician: My office is hardly for sale!

Poet: Look: I don’t know why you’re trying to dissemble. You give speeches to wealthy donors, tell them you support their aims, and in turn they fund your campaigns.

Politician: Such cynicism!

Poet: And you don’t simply listen to voters’ concerns: you create them, by promising to do more and more in return for their support.

Politician: Where did you ever get such ideas?

Poet: I pay attention to language, as George Orwell advised seventy years ago! Instead of saying “spending,” you say “investment”; rather than “taxes,” you speak of “contributions”; in place of “regulation,” you use the word “oversight.” And when you get onto the topic of education, it’s as if you discovered the source of political wealth, a gold mine of persuasion. You warm up with words of “future generations,” “modernity,” “equality,” and, yes, “technological advancement.” I don’t know which marketing firms write your speeches, but they must be rewarded well.

Politician: Why shouldn’t I speak this way, o poet? Should I be using rhyming couplets? You have no understanding of the political marketplace, since you live in the woods, amid the trees. In my world, the real world, there is always a transaction: people expect a return on their support and investments. So we must be practical, and offer them results, or, if not results, hope for a better life.

Poet: But that’s exactly the problem!

Politician: What do you mean?

Poet: Your idea of a better life. A better life for you is a longer stay in office. And a better life for your constituents is not really based on education, but on a seeming, an illusion of what might be.

Politician: So you are saying we are like Machiavelli, who told politicians to appear rather than to be good and trustworthy?

Poet: Machiavelli was too much a humanist for you. He understood how politicians must recognize the times in which they live. But he cultivated a lively conversation with the ancients, including poets, for example Ovid and Petrarch, and he wrote poetry himself. So in a letter to his good friend Francesco Vettori, after writing and quoting love poetry, he says they write letters about subjects that appear both serious and less serious, always shifting about. But, he adds, this is a good thing, because they are imitating nature, who itself is variable, and nature should be our guide.¹

Politician: But he was exiled; it was easy for him to say these things.

Poet: Do you think he read poetry only in exile, and not while he was commanding the Florentine militia in the Republic? And what of Solon, the great lawgiver, who wrote these lines:

This city of ours will never be destroyed by the planning
of Zeus, nor according to the wish of the immortal gods;
such is she who, great hearted, mightily fathered, protects us,
Pallas Athene, whose hands are stretched out over our heads.

Politician: These are noble thoughts. But how are they political?

Poet: Listen to the next verses:

But the citizens themselves in their wildness are bent on destruction
of their great city, and money is the compulsive cause.
The leaders of the people are evil-minded. The next stage
will be great suffering, recompense for their violent acts.²

Politician: Well, Solon left Athens, just as Machiavelli left Florence. They both composed verses in their leisure that their exile afforded them, like Dante! A practicing politician, one who is engaged in the commerce of politics, has no time for poetry, nor should encourage others to spend their time with it, when business of politics demands their full attention, as well as the new technologies that lead to success.

Poet: Their full attention, perhaps. But is it complete?

Politician: Now you are talking in riddles.

Poet: If politicians were more like Solon or Machiavelli, or Dante, they would understand what I mean. No wonder Yeats responded to modern political obsessions with a poem meditating on lost youth and love: for politics by itself is a hollow drum, loud but empty. Solon’s words are those of a statesman, who sees the greater range of things, beyond your limited focus, not matter how “full” it might seem. Its fullness is emptiness, its greatness of small measure. Here poetry allows us to see what is not immediately visible, but is there nonetheless, and moves us to a more genuinely full awareness.

Politician: This is too mystical – or psychological!

Poet: You only think of psychology to your own advantage, to tripping up your competition or deceiving clients to win their trust. Poetry tells us more than that, if we would hear it. Rilke, no politician, put it this way: “like the moon, so too does life surely have a side continually turned away from us, a side not the opposite to life, but rather its completion toward fulfillment, toward full counting, toward the real, entire, and complete sphere of Being.”³

Politician: Now you’re sounding astronomical, if not philosophical.

Poet: You may be making a joke, but poetry is all these things. Perhaps you are exiled, too, but from yourself, within yourself, only you don’t take the time or effort to notice what is hidden from view, but is there nonetheless, and makes you whole.

Politician: Who would support such a notion? Certainly not the majority of my constituents or clients! They seek tangible results, and demand I provide them. The press, which should take the effort, also writes about data points and dollars. It is the wisdom of the spreadsheet, not the poet’s pen.

Poet: What of this wisdom? Didn’t a politician once cite poetry when speaking to the country at a moment of crisis, reading lines that spoke of the wisdom that comes from suffering?

Politician: What are you talking about?

Poet: I’m talking about Robert Kennedy mourning the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., after his assassination. No politician’s words were of use, no practical, time-serving phrases, but rather the verse of Aeschylus:

He who learns must suffer
And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
And in our own despite, against our will,
Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.⁴

Politician: He was no politician, but a statesman.

Poet: Good point!

^{1. The Letters of Machiavelli, ed. and trans. A. Gilbert, letter of 31 January 1515↩}

^{2. Solon, “Political Verses” in Greek Lyrics, trans. R. Lattimore↩}

^{3. Rainer Maria Rilke, letter from Epiphany 1923, cited in M. Heidegger, “Wozu Dichter” in Holzwege, 8th ed., 2003, p. 302↩}

^{4. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 177-183, trans. E. Hamilton↩}