Alexander Pushkin by the Palekh School of painting
When Percy Shelley wrote, in his stirring conclusion to Defence of Poetry, that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” he was in some ways writing from a defensive crouch. Pragmatism and science were beginning to dominate the landscape and, from that vantage point, poetry appeared increasingly superfluous.
Arguing for poetry’s primacy, Shelleyed argued that the age’s breakthroughs would not have been possible without poetry. That’s because poetry reveals “the before unapprehended relations of things.” Once we see new relations—poetry’s apprehension of a higher beauty and truth—we can shape the world in new ways. Shelley says it has been ever thus, from the first talking humans, who he says were poets because they found ways to expand primitive language to capture the world around them.
Here’s a poem by my father, written in 1978, that captures Shelley’s thesis. The first stanza admits that Shelley’s assertion appears as “a bit of Romantic inanity/Which at the present in the main/Has never looked more insane.” Poets come nowhere close to becoming legislators, he observes.
And yet, Scott Bates also notes that, like those early talking humans, we are all poets. “Somewhere beneath every so-called practical peron’s rhinoceros hide,” he writes, “there’s a poem inside.” This poem, he notes, “just happens to run that person’s life.” Sometimes it’s for better, sometimes worse, but in any case poetry seen through this light once again becomes foundational. Nothing superfluous about it.
Here’s the poem:
Introduction to a Poet
By Scott Bates
POETS wrote Percy Bysshe
In a phrase that a hundred years later a celebrated Viennese psychiatrist would regard as a typical frustrated writer’s life-wish
ARE THE UNACKNOWLEDGED LEGISLATORS OF HUMANITY
A bit of Romantic inanity
Which at the present in the main
Has never looked more insane
Take LEGISLATORS for a starter
Tell it to Jimmy Carter!
See how far you get
If you ask him to put Robert Penn Warren in his Cabinet
And as for UNACKNOWLEDGED
Except of course when exclusively colleged
By a handful of liberal-arts professors who insist upon raising defunct rhymesters from the dead
Never have poets been more unacknowledgèd
Yet by damn and forsooth
Percy Bysshe did speak some truth
Because somewhere beneath every so-called practical person’s rhinoceros hide
There’s a poem inside
A poem that just happens to run that person’s life–
Maybe it’s a poem of a utopian vision of society or a utopian vision of someone else’s wife
Maybe it’s the jogger’s poem of the ultimate mile or the ultimate bod
Or maybe it’s related to Abraham’s ultimate poem about God
Maybe it’s the poem of a super-capitalist millionaire
Or maybe it’s the poem of super-socialist proletaire
Or a poem about wishing to dance like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire
But anyway it’s there
By golly it’s there
And who put it there
You better know it
Some unacknowledged poet!
My father could have noted that some poems are better, and more life affirming, than others. Still, don’t bet against poetry.