Poets Are the Unacknowledged Legislators of the World

In December 1911 Rabindranath Tagore sang a hymn at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress that praised the dispenser of India's destiny. Few in the audience could have known that the song would one day be sung by hundreds of millions of people, at schools, in stadiums and at the opening of Parliament. The Constituent Assembly adopted Jana Gana Mana as the national anthem in 1950. No court had commanded it and no minister had drafted it. A poet had given a country the words in which it now stands to attention. It is the kind of event that Shelley meant when he called poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Shelley wrote the phrase at the end of A Defence of Poetry in 1821, though it was published only in 1840, after his death. He was answering a friend who had claimed that poetry was a useless art in an age of reason and commerce. Shelley replied that poets are the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present. They see what is coming, name what is wrong and shape the sympathies from which institutions grow. Laws, in his view, are the late and formal expression of what poets have already made imaginable.

The claim has an old history. Plato, in the Republic, proposed to banish the poets from his ideal city because they had too much power over the souls of the young. A philosopher does not exile those who are harmless. The Greeks learnt their gods and their morals from Homer, and the Indian tradition learnt its ethics from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which have shaped public ideas of duty and kingship far more than any treatise. In both cultures the poet was in practice the teacher of the nation.

Modern history shows the same pattern. During the freedom movement in India, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's Vande Mataram became a rallying cry in the early twentieth century, while Subramania Bharati in Tamil and Iqbal in Urdu gave the cause language that speeches could not. In the twentieth century Faiz Ahmed Faiz was jailed in Pakistan for his poetry and wrote some of his finest verse in prison, and Pablo Neruda's verse became a voice for the Chilean left. In Poland Czeslaw Milosz and in Russia Anna Akhmatova became moral authorities in societies where politics had lost credit.

In both cultures the poet was in practice the teacher of the nation.

States have understood the power of poets by fearing it. Osip Mandelstam wrote a satirical poem about Stalin in 1933, was arrested and died in a transit camp in 1938. His wife Nadezhda memorised his poems so that they would survive. Tyrannies do not spend resources to persecute people who change nothing. Governments also use poets, by commissioning anthems, epics and slogans that lend a regime a sense of legitimacy, and a few poets have held office themselves, such as Leopold Senghor, who served as the first president of Senegal for twenty years after independence in 1960.

How do poets legislate in practice? Their work operates at the level of vocabulary and feeling. They give a name to an injustice that was previously unnoticed, so that the injustice can be argued about. The phrase untouchable was replaced in public discussion by Gandhi's Harijan and then by the community's own word Dalit, and poets such as Namdeo Dhasal gave the word its force. Words alter what can be said, and what can be said alters what can be done. The legislator of the law of the land acts last, after the poet has changed the climate in which the law will be read.

Tagore also shows the other side of the legislator's work. He refused to accept the nationalism that he helped to inspire, and in his lectures on the subject in 1917 he warned that worship of the nation could harden into aggression and self worship. The poet who gave a country its anthem was thus one of its first critics. Dante's Divine Comedy, written in the fourteenth century, did more to fix the Italian language and the idea of a common Italian culture than any prince of the peninsula, and Italy was united politically only in 1861. The poet's legislation is often a conscience that stands outside the legislature, speaking to rulers on behalf of those whom rulers forget.

But there are powerful objections. W. H. Auden wrote in 1939, in his elegy for Yeats, that poetry makes nothing happen. He meant that no poem ever stopped a tank or fed a child. Shelley's own poem on the Peterloo massacre of 1819, The Mask of Anarchy, which urged the workers to stand like a lion after slumber, was not published until long after his death, and the repressive laws of the time were not softened by it. If the legislators are unacknowledged, they are also often unread.

A further difficulty is that poets have made bad laws as well as good ones. The futurist Filippo Marinetti glorified war and fascism in verse, and poets have written hymns to dictators and to violent nationalism. Ezra Pound broadcast fascist propaganda from Italy. The same power that opens the imagination to justice can close it to cruelty. A poet's authority is not the authority of a judge, since nothing guarantees that it is exercised well. If poets legislate, they do so without a constitution, an electorate or an appeal.

It may be that the phrase is best read as a claim about priority and not about power. The imagination comes before the statute, and a society can enact only what it has first learnt to picture. The legislation that Shelley had in mind is the slow making of a sensibility, which is why a country that neglects its poets in schools and public life may find that its laws lack the ground on which they stand. The odd consequence of the topic is that the legislators who go unacknowledged do so by their own wish, since the moment they are formally recognised, they have become officials, and officials rarely write poems of that kind.