politics and poetics 59cians’ promises.^2 Her poem entitled ‘Politics’ asserts the failure of
ideals, since politics turn the face to ‘stone’, the right hand to ‘a
gauntlet’, the left ‘a glove puppet’.^3 Duffy allies political rhetoric
to gambling and the fi scal, a politician’s speech becomes ‘your lips
dice’ and a kiss is a ‘dropped pound coin’. While knowledge of the
abuse of expenses forms the bedrock to understanding ‘Politics’,
Duffy’s disgust is levied at the manipulation of language and its
perversion to ‘Latin, gibberish, feedback static’. ‘Politics’ inves-
tigates the pact made between members of parliament and their
role of representing the public good. In a bid to reinsert an ethics
of representation and higher linguistic code, the speaker states
that politics must roar to ‘your conscience, moral compass truth’.
Paradoxically, Duffy’s closing cry of ‘POLITICS, POLITICS,
POLITICS’ is not as an absolute dismissal, nor a rallying cry, but
as an attempt to reclaim the word to a fundamental element of good
upon which all action must be based.
FOUNDING PROPOSITIONS: POLITICS AND POST-
WORLD WAR II POETRY
From these opening observations it may seem that the relation-
ship between poetry and politics must always be one of competing
claims for the rights to truth and representing the public good.
The often cited and misunderstood quotation from W. H. Auden,
‘poetry makes nothing happen’, can be read as a central nexus of
our discussion.^4 Following World War II there was a necessary and,
at times, passionate questioning of the role of poetry in the public
sphere. Indeed it might appear that the writing of poetry during
times of political crisis equates to Nero fi ddling as Rome burns.
One may well question whether Shelley’s nineteenth-century
treatise on poets as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’
in his ‘A Defence of Poetry’ ( 1821 ) retains any resonance.^5 Poetry,
Shelley argued, is central to human life because it is the creator of
culture; the poet creates a broad vision that transcends his time and
place, to create a dialogue with past and future generations. While
Auden might initially appear to be dismissive of poetry’s power,
his poem is an admission that poetry ‘survives a way of happening,