Poetry and politics

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/dec/15/poetry-protest-politics

“But is protest poetry the preserve of the spoken word poet? In the 1970s, American poet Richard Wilbur, symbol of all things urbane and learned, offered “To the Student Strikers”, urging reflection and calm during the Vietnam war. In “A Miltonic Sonnet for Mr Johnson”, he suggests that Thomas Jefferson “would have wept to see small nations dread / The imposition of our cattle-brand, / With public truth at home mistold or banned, / And in whose term no army’s blood was shed.” However, Wilbur cautions that when “poets begin preaching to the choir, it takes the adventure and variety out of the poetry.”

So is this poetry’s role: to approach unrest and upheaval slant, and not head-on? And has poetry on the page been more effective in documenting the aftermath of great events? Both the late Ken Smith and Sean O’Brien have documented the intellectual legacy of post-industrial and rural communities recovering their identities after decades of decline. Ken Smith, son of a farm labourer, produced a poetry imbued with a melancholy sense of those like his father who, as O’Brien noted in Smith’s obituary, had “left / not a mark, not a footprint”.”