Blackwell Reference Online

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In this essay I have taken on a potentially infinite task. Today most critics and theorists hold that the connection between poetry and politics is not limited just to situations in which poets become politically involved in an explicit way, but instead all cultural expression is related to the social and political context - whether implicitly or explicitly - in which it is produced. In this expansive definition all poetry is political in one way or another, since even the choice to eschew explicit political involvement or references constitutes a form of political action (or perhaps more precisely inaction). To write an essay on the relation between poetry and politics in the twentieth century would in this view require discussing all poetry written in the century and virtually everything of political significance which occurred in the twentieth century. This is of course a tall order indeed.Let me set your mind at ease immediately: such an expansive discussion - whatever its merits or demerits - is obviously impossible within the limits set for me here. In any case, the gesture of making everything political effaces a crucial distinction, perhaps not between the political and the non-political (since that depends on a notion of the aesthetic critiqued by those who hold this more expansive notion), but at the very least between the intentionally political and the intentionally ... log in or subscribe to read full text