Shelley and the Stasi

"'The unacknowledged legislators of the world'" describes the secret police, not the poets."

W.H. Auden, "Writing" from The Dyer's Hand (1962)

"The unacknowledged legislators of the world" is, of course, the early-19th century British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley's concluding sentence from his A Defense of Poetry (1820). In full, it reads like this: "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

Auden, however, would have none of it, and in the passage I've quoted above, he joined an august list of 20th century poets and critics--T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate, among others--who delighted in letting the air out of Shelley's transcendent tires. And Auden is certainly right. Compared to the Stasi, then as now, poets have relatively little influence over people's or a nations' behavior.

But I'm struck by certain ironies in Auden's undoubtedly clever reworking of Shelley.

One, because of his anti-clerical writings, Shelley himself was "kept under watch by the civil authorities" in England and Ireland--that is, by the secret police of his day. Did Shelley believe the civil authorities kept an eye on him because they read too much of his poetry--or because they hadn't read enough?

Two, I'm reminded of what the British critic Raymond Williams made of Shelley's Defense. In Culture & Society (1958), he gives this reading of the concluding lines:

"The last pages of Shelley's Defense of Poetry are painful to read. The bearers of a high imaginative skill become suddenly the 'legislators', at the very moment when they are being forced into practical exile; their description as 'unacknowledged', which, on the theory, ought only to be a fact to be accepted, carries with it also the felt helplessness of a generation."

As usual, Williams is on the mark. Under the pressure of irrelevance, Shelley overplayed his hand. What's surprising is that anyone ever believed him. Maybe if Shelley had said the poets are the unacknowledged legislators of readers of poetry, he would have been on firmer ground, but even that may have involved a little wobbling.

Finally, alert readers will recognize Auden's aphorism as a variation on an earlier theme. Of the late-19th, early 20th century Irish poet W.B. Yeats's failure to shape Irish politics to his liking, Auden famously observed in "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" that "poetry makes nothing happen." For not making anything happen, though, Auden sure as hell wrote a lot of poetry. His Collected Poems runs to 960 pages. In other words, poetry at least made Auden happen.

But to be fair to Auden, he did not say poetry did nothing. "For poetry makes nothing happen," Auden wrote, and then went on: "It survives/ In the valley of its saying, where executives/ Would never want to tamper; it flows south/ From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs/ Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives/ A way of happening; a mouth."