Poetry and Revolution

Of human activities, writing poetry is one of the least revolutionary. The states of being a rentier, a merchant, a capitalist, contribute their bits to revolution: they actively crumble. But the writing of a poem in itself solves the poem’s problem. Separate poems are separate and complete and ideal worlds. If a poem is not complete in itself and if its content spills over into our world of confused emotions, then it is a bad poem, and however much it may impress people at present, soon it will be forgotten and will cease to be a poem at all. This is what people mean when they say that it is impossible to write good propagandist poetry. A work of art cannot reach out into everyday life and tell us whom to vote for and what kind of factories to build, because injunctions how to act in a world that has nothing to do with the poem destroy the poem’s unity. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.