Speeches going from bad to worse? Politicians, read some verse!
Great poetry could teach Westminster a lot about emotional sensitivity and linguistic punch
It’s often said that the people who win in politics are the ones with the clearest narrative. When you look at history’s great orators – Churchill, Nye Bevan – you find people who can tell a compelling story about who we are, the world we live in, and what needs to be done about it.
Our politicians seem to lack that at the moment. From all sides, we hear a deadening political prose that is both aggressive and predictable: the repetition of dull-sounding, meaningless slogans; the constant evasion when asked to give clear answers; the demonisation of other groups with simple name-calling. Above all, the depressing lack of vision.
There is a solution to this, and I’ve said it before: MPS should be made to read poetry. Our poetic culture is a tremendous resource, and to turn your back on it is a sign of almost criminal stupidity. Reading a good poet increases your appreciation of accurate, salty language – and anyone whose day-to-day tools are words can benefit from having those skills smartened up. But reading poetry also makes you think more deeply about your relationships with other people, your humanity, those big questions of death, sex and love.
If Theresa May wants to get away from Westminster, to fly away to another world in her head, I recommend she sit down with the new collected poems of Elizabeth Bishop, for example. She would come back feeling better about herself. Anyone (but particularly a legislator) who does that is going to be more sensitive and empathetic – and that’s a good thing.
Last year, the UK had its highest poetry book sales on record. It’s not hard to see why: if you are concerned by the state of the world, and all you can hear are these big, angry debates, poetry offers a sane way through. In times of change and upheaval, people turn to poetry not just for solace, but to think about the world more sharply.
As chair of this year’s Forward Prizes, judging the best verse published in Britain this year, I’ve seen it at work as a type of higher journalism: I’ve read poems on African politics, religion and Brexit. Among the shortlisted poets, there’s everything from a gay Vietnameseamerican writer talking about sex from his point of view as a migrant – a subject completely outside my experience – to a really interesting debate between a Christian woman and her atheist lover. When
WH Auden wrote “poetry makes nothing happen”, he was rebutting Shelley’s claim that poets were the “unacknowledged legislators of the world”.
But looking at the world today, it seems Shelley had it right. Poets at the height of their art can spot things about the way we live now, which happens before the world of politics, or the internet, have noticed them. New news about the human condition often comes first from poetry. That then filters into the general culture, and can eventually re-emerge in the form of political ideas. The anti-war poets of the Sixties, Adrian Mitchell in particular, helped change the mood of the country towards a lot of military issues, including nuclear weapons. They were part of that so-called peace movement, and they had an effect.
There’s a cultural movement today that’s in favour of the authentic and against the over-mediated. Look on social media, and you’ll find plenty of ridiculous people swapping abuse – but you will also find them responding to the world by sharing poems. If you think of the very early origins of the sonnet, for instance, a 14-line poem suddenly became popular partly because it was passed from hand to hand. Moreover the practical case for short pieces of writing has always been there. Twitter requires people to have the same kind of economy as a sonnet-writer would have done. There is a parallel there. Sonnets were the memes of their time.
With this year’s Forward Prizes, I was very clear that we should be judging purely on the quality of the verse. I didn’t want political correctness to ensure that we had a certain number of poets of this colour or that culture. And yet, on the shortlists are writers from Trinidad, Ireland, Jamaica and Vietnam. Britain is the world’s island; we have become a global culture.
For anyone hoping to understand our world, and how it is changing, the first place to look is poetry.
Andrew Marr was talking to Tristram Fane Saunders. The Forward Poetry Prizes will be awarded tomorrow at the Royal Festival Hall. Details: forwardartsfoundation.org