Tennyson does not spring to mind as a poet of political expression....... my knowledge base on this being very thin - but I do recall attempts to educate me when I was either not ready for it  nor in the mood to listen. However, we have learned people in our ranks who might have something to offer on this topic. Slogans could be included, I suggest because of  strong use of language appeal. Am prepared to be shot down  - flying on a  very short kite string on this one.

Blake would seem a better exponent to me.

What an interesting topic - where do we start? Please can we look at song lyrics, too? I think the latter are important - remember Percy Bysshe Shelley's famous observation at the end of his "Defence of Poetry" that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world"? Music, especially nowadays, is often the vehicle for the dissemination of political words that get people thinking, talking and acting. The lyrics of protest songs are really interesting.

We might start this thread with three musings on "London" - all pretty negative, I'm afraid: Blake's "London", published in 1794, Wordsworth's "London 1802" (nordmann should love this one - it could have been written yesterday) and the Clash's political rant of 1979, the famous "London Calling" - title nicely ironic, of course.

London, 1802

MILTON! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
   England hath need of thee: she is a fen
   Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
   Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
   Oh! Raise us up, return to us again,
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power!
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;
   Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
   Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
   So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
   The lowliest duties on herself did lay.


Personally, I prefer Blake. He said in these few lines all the Marxists have ever said - but with more real empathy, I think:

ENGLAND IN 1819

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,--
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, mud from a muddy spring,--
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,--
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,--
An army which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,--
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless, a book sealed,--
A Senate—Time's worst statute unrepealed,--
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst to illumine our tempestuous day.



Another one the management will no doubt approve.


Edit: Forgot to add that this Shelley sonnet was written in response to the Peterloo Massacre, August, 1819. It was not published until 1839 - political  dynamite, I suppose, especially the references to the not-very-royal Royal Family.

I'm not sure what is meant here by "political poetry". Poetry inspired by political events, I suppose, but then the examples above from Temp could also be classified as "social commentary" too, if a little magniloquent to be regarded as typical of that genre. Probably too magniloquent anyway in fact if they were ever designed to be understood and appreciated as incendiary, especially by those actually affected by the politics under scrutiny. Shelley's reputation and self-esteem might both indeed have been well served by the fact that his poem was not published until ten years after his own death - had it been published and circulated in Manchester in the immediate aftermath of the events he might have been very dispirited to find that the rather more prosaic pamphlets of James Wroe (he who poetically coined the phrase "Peterloo") eloquently depicted the suffering of the victims and the point of their protest, as well as including a stirring call to arms in promoting their good fight that caught the imagination of the entire nation. Indeed it was probably from this very prose that Shelley, living in Italy at the time of the massacre, belatedly heard of events and was himself "fired up" enough to knock off a ditty about it.

However surely this cannot be the sole criteria for deciding which poetry may be termed political and which may not. Poetry, and certainly that in the form of song lyrics, written for a purpose far removed from political considerations has often been recruited nevertheless to political ends. Conversely, nursery rhyme anthologies are replete with examples of verse travelling in the opposite direction, highly political subjects when first composed but now reduced to innocent and anodyne doggerel stripped completely of their original point.

"Real" political poetry therefore, in my view, is probably that composed not only as commentary related to a political cause but also by someone whose contribution to the same cause went further than spilling a little ink in the process. In old Gaelic society the "filí", a highly political appointment, was expected to use his poetic prowess in the furthering of his employer's political ambition, and as a high ranking official was also frequently handed military command. One 6th century battle in the area of Leitrim/Fermanagh was reputedly fought between two poets from rival clans whose bosses were competing for the throne of Breffni, each "filí" leading a regiment of fellow poets and musicians. Their names were remembered for centuries after, though not those of their employers, which suggests the regard the Irish held for "political poets", and certainly those who between them notched up what was presumably the most lyrical and musical bloodbath in history.

In later times, and obviously in keeping with this Gaelic tradition, no Irish revolution worth its salt was considered the real deal unless it also attracted its fair share of "political poets" to the cause. Not, like Shelley, sitting at a safe distance and showing their "solidarity" once they know the thing is over. Or for that matter like Byron, whose poetic dedication to the adopted cause of Greek liberation was matched by actions rarely extending beyond bankrolling some dodgy Greek "commanders", sexual predation (or "unrequited love" once translated into poetic form by Byron), and getting sick.

In Ireland the poet was expected to be a little more "hands on" (in a military sense and not in a Byron sense), churning out the good stuff right throughout the campaign and up to the day he snuffed it for the cause. And neither was it to be cheap, propagandistic, sentimental jingo nonsense such as the English liked. The Irish motto seemed to be "If you're going to be a political poet then fine, but don't forget the poetry bit!".

A good example is this, from Thomas McDonagh, who composed this poem in the form of advice for his new born son who he knows he shall not see grow up. A short while later in the aftermath of the 1916 rising which McDonagh had helped organise and in which he fought, he requested his wife publish this poem the day before his execution by the British.



Now, my son, is life for you,
And I wish you joy of it,-
Joy of power in all you do,
Deeper passion, better wit
Than I had who had enough,
Quicker life and length thereof,
More of every gift but love.

Love I have beyond all men,
Love that now you share with me-
What have I to wish you then
But that you be good and free,
And that God to you may give
Grace in stronger days to live?

For I wish you more than I
Ever knew of glorious deed,
Though no rapture passed me by
That an eager heart could heed,
Though I followed heights and sought
Things the sequel never brought.

Wild and perilous holy things
Flaming with a martyr's blood,
And the joy that laughs and sings
Where a foe must be withstood,
Joy of headlong happy chance
Leading on the battle dance.

But I found no enemy,
No man in a world of wrong,
That Christ's word of charity
Did not render clean and strong-
Who was I to judge my kind,
Blindest groper of the blind?

Powerful stuff - with surprising forgiveness for his executioners that, one felt, was hardly reciprocated. Seventy years later, another Irish political prisoner of the British with a poetic bent was less forgiving of his captors, though his own death for the cause probably exceeds McDonagh's now in the popular imagination, and not least for the remarkably insightful poetry he produced on the way - more reminiscent of Wilde than McDonagh, Plunkett or Pearse. Bobby Sands' account of being tortured under interrogation in Castlereagh is all the more harrowing for its being in poetic form than for its details, many of which had been recounted in less lyrical form by others and which the British tried hard to keep from the public domain. However even a brutal regime finds it hard to prevent lines like these from doing the public rounds, especially when composed in a style guaranteed to aid their immediate transmission among "poetry circles" convening in every public house in the country within days:

To roll and droll on country stroll
Is quite a pleasant flip,
To chase and race through open space
Is such a thrilling skip,
To trot like swine through one’s urine
Is not so nice a trip

Real "political poetry", composed by real "political poets", is as much part of the arsenal as any amount of Semtex.

Within Britain of course there is a vibrant and ever-growing "political poetry movement" driven largely by immigrants - some of whose poets, for example those within the Afro Caribbean community, are now so long established that their work deserves academic and popular appreciation equal to any afforded to more "classical" interpretations of the medium. In a manner that any Dark Ages Gael (or Saxon for that matter) would immediately recognise, poets from within this culture are not expected simply to sit back and commentate on events but instead to bring their particular poetic skills to the front line and make them work for the cause - in post-industrial Britain one which all too often centres on a catastrophic failure of social integration within a society increasingly encouraged anyway by those in power to disintegrate even further. For immigrant communities (many of which should long ago have had no further need even to be described as such) this continues to have many severe political repercussions as an already vulnerable section of society finds those vulnerabilities exacerbated and increasingly exploited by others .

The poetry expressing this community's wide range of reaction to their often dire political and social predicament is as varied as the reaction itself, ranging from (often wildly unfocused) militancy to cogent and earnest appeal to anyone who's listening to at least recognise the problem, if not actively engage in resolving it.

Trying to reflect that variety with examples here would be pointless, as would also be any attempt to outline degrees of politicisation reflected through this poetry. It would be hard to know where to start and even harder to know where to end - so rich and replete is the genre now. However one aspect to this existential struggle as expressed poetically is that it has produced some of the most powerful examples of humanitarian appeal ever committed to verse and this can certainly be exemplified. Again we're spoilt for choice but one of my many favourites is Benjamin Zephaniah's "We Refugees", already over two decades since its composition and only becoming even more sadly apposite as time goes on:

I come from a musical place
Where they shoot me for my song
And my brother has been tortured
By my brother in my land.

I come from a beautiful place
Where they hate my shade of skin
They don't like the way I pray
And they ban free poetry.

I come from a beautiful place
Where girls cannot go to school
There you are told what to believe
And even young boys must grow beards.

I come from a great old forest
I think it is now a field
And the people I once knew
Are not there now.

We can all be refugees
Nobody is safe,
All it takes is a mad leader
Or no rain to bring forth food,
We can all be refugees
We can all be told to go,
We can be hated by someone
For being someone.

I come from a beautiful place
Where the valley floods each year
And each year the hurricane tells us
That we must keep moving on.

I come from an ancient place
All my family were born there
And I would like to go there
But I really want to live.

I come from a sunny, sandy place
Where tourists go to darken skin
And dealers like to sell guns there
I just can't tell you what's the price.

I am told I have no country now
I am told I am a lie
I am told that modern history books
May forget my name.

We can all be refugees
Sometimes it only takes a day,
Sometimes it only takes a handshake
Or a paper that is signed.
We all came from refugees
Nobody simply just appeared,
Nobody's here without a struggle,
And why should we live in fear
Of the weather or the troubles?
We all came here from somewhere.

Going back to your previous post, I should like to add this. I wanted to find out a little more about Yeats before attempting any comment on his famous - and very ambiguous - poem (perhaps the most famous ever written by a poet from your country): Easter, 1916. In my random search, I stumbled on the following extremely interesting article:


Remembering the Poets Who Fought For Irish Independence


I have watched three films over the past weekend all about the Irish struggles: The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Some Mother's Son and Maze. I have been left reflecting on the thuggery and evil of both sides in that terrible conflict - and of the women's despair as they watched their partners, their sons and their brothers fight it out: war can be such a huge and tempting distraction for men. Were there any female Irish poets writing about all this, or is that a daft question?

One little glimmer of what used to be called chivalry I found in a comment from the Literary Hub article. The British may have been utter bastards to your fighters, nordmann, but at least they recognised greatness when they saw it, and perhaps were not such bastards that they could not acknowledge it:

But it was MacDonagh’s gallantry which was immortalized, when, faced with death, he offered each member of the firing squad a cigarette. He was said to have presented his silver cigarette case to the commanding officer shortly before being shot, commenting, “I won’t be needing this – would you like to have it?”

It was later remarked by the British that “They all died well. But MacDonagh, he died like a prince.”


"...he died like a prince": a terrible beauty - poetry - in those words from us, your hated enemies.


I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

                     —From Easter, 1916 by William Butler Yeats

Temp wrote:

... his famous - and very ambiguous - poem (perhaps the most famous ever written by a poet from your country): Easter, 1916.

In Ireland he's probably better remembered for a similar effort, "September 1913" which, although the last line repeated in each stanza was certainly cited as evidence of Yeats' nationalist sympathies, was nevertheless representative of his real agenda found within almost all of his works - a deep disillusionment with the middle classes and the loss of a more noble and innocent time and people which could now never be reversed. This resonated abroad, certainly - especially in England in fact - and simply confirmed, in many Irish people's eyes, the suspicion that he was, rather like Shelley before him in a different context, merely "dabbling" in political commentary and causes. For him the struggles of the people and the personalities it threw up were mostly a source of inspiration for him to indulge in what were admittedly well crafted but fundamentally meaningless poems as political observation goes. Instead he pursued a rather pointless elevation of over-romanticised myth that had little or no relevance to the ordinary people or their tribulations, despite how frequently he co-opted them into his texts. So there is a reason why he must be excluded from the "political poet" tradition mentioned above as it had developed in Ireland, and in fact should more accurately be positioned within the English poetic tradition as it had become in his time. He would probably have protested this classification, but with an equal disregard for reality as he might also have displayed in protesting the fact that he was firmly ensconced within the very middle classes who were so often the target of his ire.

To answer the question about female poets who might, unlike Yeats, actually fit into the "filíochta" tradition then of course "yes" is the answer. Being women and meeting expectations based on their sex their poetry often far surpassed their male equivalents in terms of scope of subject and depth of insight into areas which men, through ignorance or prejudice, chose to avoid. However when it came to marshalling their skills for the "cause" they were no slouches at producing work with the required balance of political awareness and transcendental ability to communicate on several levels at once.

Ellen Forrester, now little remembered even in Ireland, was a genius in this respect. Even Yeats once wrote a scathing review of her oeuvre (she had been dead 20 years so maybe he reckoned he was safe) in a national newspaper and received such a backlash from his peers and most of the readership that he immediately backtracked and then spent the rest of his life periodically extolling her skill at doing what he had always signally failed to do, employing complex and subtle analogy to communicate radical notions of self-determination and independence (not just politically). Forrester's poems became ballads almost overnight as she released them and she was the "muse" of choice for the Young Irelanders when they staged their ill-fated rebellion in the 1840s. Forrester's more incendiary poems were published as "Arthur" Forrester (her estranged husband's name - which begs a lot of really spicy questions), not to hide her identity as such but mostly because such fiery (and illegal) texts simply might not have been believed as coming from a female hand and she didn't want mere chauvinism slowing down their mission.

Whereas Yeats and others tried to "shame" Irish "manhood" into joining the struggle while waxing lyrical about a romantic golden age that had never existed, Forrester's approach was quite different. Her poem "Sunshine in the Cell", written from the point of view of an incarcerated young man (Ireland), takes the reader through a mental process in which the boy begins by ruing his loss of freedom, wallows for a while in false sentiment (where Yeats and others got stuck), starts to sort out the valid bits from the fantasy bits, realises that the valid bits represent equally valid ideals worth living and even dying for, cries in a very un-manlike way at what has really therefore been lost, and then turns that grief into a steely resolve to rectify things from that point on.

"Oh shame, the manhood dawning o'er my face
Shrinks back abashed at this weak girlish shower
I will be calm
I will not thus disgrace the spirit of my fathers
From this hour My heart is steel
Steel to the very core
And tho it break, these eyes shall weep no more!"

Kamikaze pilots must have listened to similar motivational literature prior to their missions. Irish men certainly recognised their cue when they read it.

PS: McDonagh, "the Prince", was cheating on his wife - big time (bigamist time, even). Word has it he didn't even leave the poor woman a lousy packet of fags after he'd snuffed it. Wonder what happened to those ciggies, though - we know he had a packet on him when he was arrested ....

Well, I'm probably still a fan of Byron and Shelley and your dubious Irish Prince - such nice ideas for the foolish and perhaps rather dodgy idealist.

I've never known quite what to make of Andrew Marvell, whose An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return From Ireland is generally reckoned to be the finest political poem written in English. Who am I to disagree? He manages to be gracious to Charles I and butters up Cromwell something rotten at the same time - a natural diplomat in verse, I suppose. 

I'm not sure the Irish would agree with his assessment of England's answer to Julius Caesar. I won't paste the complete poem here, just a couple of sections of it. For anyone interested (unlikely) you can read the whole (odious) thing here:

Marvell's Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell's Return From Ireland

That thence the royal actor borne
The tragic scaffold might adorn,
While round the armed bands
Did clap their bloody hands.                  
He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene,
But with his keener eye
The axe’s edge did try;
Nor call’d the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right,
But bowed his comely head
Down as upon a bed...


...And now the Irish are asham’d
To see themselves in one year tam’d;
So much one man can do
That does both act and know.
They can affirm his praises best,
And have, though overcome, confest
How good he is, how just,
And fit for highest trust;
Nor yet grown stiffer with command,
But still in the republic’s hand;
How fit he is to sway
That can so well obey.
He to the Commons’ feet presents
A kingdom for his first year’s rents;                
And, what he may, forbears
His fame, to make it theirs,
And has his sword and spoils ungirt,
To lay them at the public’s skirt.
So when the falcon high
Falls heavy from the sky,
She, having kill’d, no more does search
But on the next green bough to perch,
Where, when he first does lure,
The falc’ner has her sure.
What may not then our isle presume
While victory his crest does plume!
What may not others fear
If thus he crown each year!
A Cæsar he ere long to Gaul,
To Italy an Hannibal,
And to all states not free,
Shall climacteric be.
The Pict no shelter now shall find
Within his parti-colour’d mind;
But from this valour sad
Shrink underneath the plaid,
Happy if in the tufted brake
The English hunter him mistake,
Nor lay his hounds in near
The Caledonian deer.

Talking of Horace, what about the Roman political poets? As a bit of a welcome distraction from the dreadful Maxima (she of the peculiar pink "panties"), any comment about them (the poets, I mean, not M's "panties")? I've always been confused by "the second voice" of Virgil. I think it means he actually hated Augustus and his rotten Empire, but I honestly don't know enough to comment intelligently. Was Virgil another poet like Marvell - a diplomat - who knew not only how to survive, but also how to get and keep a good job working for the regime? Yet Marvell was supposed to be a man of great integrity. Was Virgil? Or is "integrity" really just being sensible?

Virgil, like all Romans (and mafioso today), had a problem with published pronouncements and impartiality. Not only did they not go together but it was simply impossible for them to do so - even if the author managed to cleverly get an impartial commentary out into the public domain the public response would be to distrust the author's intentions or at least regard them as slightly unhinged. A poet was expected to speak someone else's mind, not his own. This is why Juvenal, who bucked this trend, acquired such a scandalous reputation as a "satirist" in his day. His poems were more racy than satirical and his "wit" was hardly refined, but his audacity (or political stupidity) ensured a notoriety sufficient to have preserved many of his works for posterity, though not sufficient to spare him from the system taking its inevitable revenge. Unlike Athens in its heyday, where poets and dramatists were appreciated for standing outside the system and pointing out its anomalies, Roman poets were as much part of the patronage tyranny as anyone else, including their audience, who therefore could not even show appreciation for a poet sneakily slipping in some topical criticism in his stuff. They'd be more likely to denounce him to the authorities.

Post-Renaissance European poetry that made it into widespread publication can be judged therefore on which tradition - Greek or Roman - it could be said to most emulate, and when you find a predominance of one versus the other in any given society you also get a pretty fair pointer towards the political nature of the state in question. Britain, for example, produced an inordinate amount of "establishment" poetry (much of it verging on toadyism indeed) whereas Ireland, a society by then defining itself in opposition to its powerful neighbour, and whose own ancient poetic tradition had contained practitioners of equal or higher social rank than many of the politicos, developed a very refined and significant "anti-establishment" tone. Exceptions abounded in either society but the stuff that made it into students' textbooks is a good guide to the predominant trend in both.

But back to McDonagh, and probably a good indication of just how "non-establishment" Irish poetry was by default ("anti-" doesn't work when the definition of the "establishment" is in a period of turmoil), we schoolchildren back in the day were introduced to the guy not as a poet but as the subject of what, in Ireland, is a very famous poem indeed. Written by his mate, the Irish poet Francis Ledwidge, while Ledwidge was recovering in a British Army hospital during WWI having fought in Gallipoli and Serbia (he was later to die at Passchendaele) where he had just heard the news about the Easter Rising back in Ireland, the poem follows a very ancient Irish style of lament using a very common theme in which the subject is not named and our own sorrow at his demise will henceforth only be accentuated when we appreciate the natural beauty of this world, not alleviated. When the Irish say "the world will be a poorer place without X" they really mean it! The three principal examples from nature within the verses - the bittern, spring flowers, and "dark" cattle - are all heavily loaded with ancient symbolism in Gaelic culture but that doesn't distract from the elegant simplicity of the poem and the very real sense of grief at McDonagh's death that the poet communicates.

He shall not hear the bittern cry
In the wild sky where he is lain
Nor voices of the sweeter birds
Above the wailing of the rain.

Nor shall he know when loud March blows
Thro’ slanting snows her fanfare shrill
Blowing to flame the golden cup
Of many an upset daffodil.

And when the dark cow leaves the moor
And pastures poor with greedy weeds
Perhaps he’ll hear her low at morn
Lifting her horn in pleasant meads.

A heartfelt lament for a fallen hero of the 1916 Rising written by a British Army corporal. However, as ironic and historically accurate as each of these descriptions may be, the poem (like reality) transcends such lazy categorizations.

nordmann wrote:

He shall not hear the bittern cry
In the wild sky where he is lain
Nor voices of the sweeter birds
Above the wailing of the rain.

Nor shall he know when loud March blows
Thro’ slanting snows her fanfare shrill
Blowing to flame the golden cup
Of many an upset daffodil.

And when the dark cow leaves the moor
And pastures poor with greedy weeds
Perhaps he’ll hear her low at morn
Lifting her horn in pleasant meads.

Now that's what I call proper poetry - far better than all the obvious "political" stuff.

The bittern crying in the "wild sky", the "dark cow" and the "upset daffodil" - lovely, lovely images...

Going to read more of this lot - the Irish Prince and his British Army corporal friend, Ledwidge. Never heard of them before this thread - now there's an admission...