Literature and Politics

Not all writers are content to restrict themselves to purely aesthetic definitions of their art, and there has been a long-standing discussion about how art and politics may interact.

Shelley famously named poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”: it has been argued that creative writing and politics can naturally conjoin (Paul de Man) and are linked in an ‘ethically primary’ manner. On the other hand, as Auden famously declared, those who write poems may be “singularly ill-equipped to understand politics”: by directly addressing public issues, artists can be relegated to a sub-genre of ‘political poetry,’ seen as banal, taking a blinkered stand and/or writing to order.

Some contemporary poets have denied that politics should be off-limits. Although creative writers who explore public and political topics sometimes appear partisan or trite, a small number apply sophisticated strategies that avoid the merely didactic or polemical.

I will provide a brief historical survey of the relationship between politics and poetry, including the American Beat poets. In this context, I will investigate Australian poets Barry Hill, Robert Adamson, Jennifer Maiden and J.S. Harry. These poets have specifically addressed, sometimes over the course of their creative careers, the effects of global events – particularly, the 11 September 2001 attacks and the war in Iraq. I will argue that, although artistic intentions can suffer from partisan choices, these poets succeed in sidestepping self-imposed restrictions and are able to work gainfully at the intersections of public events and private poetics. Without adopting overt political agendas, they display the complexities and pan-referentiality of political issues in a poetic context, producing enrichment, even a modest renewal, of both discourses.

Stephen Lawrence has four published collections of poetry, and is completing a PhD in Creative Writing. He has been a speechwriter, media and publications officer for the SA government, and was poetry editor for Wet Ink magazine. He has edited eight anthologies and judged the Adelaide Festival Literary Awards since 2002.