The theme of poet as legislator reached its peak in the Romantic era,C. Prendergast ed., Cultural Materialism (1995) p. 222 epitomised in Shelley's view of poets as the 'unacknowledged legislators of the world'.Shelley, The Defence of Poetry (1821) Richard Holmes, Dr Johnson and Mr Savage (1994) p. 51
However the concept had a long prehistory in Western culture, with classical figures like Orpheus or Solon being appealed to as precedents for the poet's civilising role.D. Griffin, Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2005) p. 70
Classical origins
Plato's opposition to poets in his ideal Republic was predicated on the contemporary existence of Homeric expounders who claimed that "a man ought to regulate the tenour of his whole life by this poet's directions".J. L. Davies/D. J. Vaughan trans., The Republic of Plato (1908) p. 352 Plato only allowed the already censured poet to guide the young, to be an acknowledged legislator at the price of total external control.E. B. Castle, Ancient Education and Today (1969) p. 91
Less threatened by the poetic role, the Romans by contrast saw poetry, with Horace, as primarily pleasing, and only secondarily as instructive.M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1971) p. 16
Renaissance and Augustan views
Building on the view of the fifteenth century Florentine Neoplatonists of the poet as seer,M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1971) p. 272 however, Sir Philip Sidney developed a more powerful concept of the poet as overtopping the philosopher, historian and lawyer to stand out as "the monarch...of all sciences.J. A van Dorsten ed, Sidney: A Defence of Poetry (1984) p. 39
Such a viewpoint was more or less institutionalised in Augustan literature, Johnson's Rasselas maintaining for example that the poet "must write as the interpreter of nature and the legislator of mankind"Samuel Johnson, Rasselas (1905) p. 42 – a fully public, even patriotic role moreoverD. Griffin, Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2005) p. 71-2
Romantic peaks
By contrast the Romantic view of the poet as unackowledged legislator emerges at the turn of the century in the writing of William Godwin, with his anarchic view of the poet as "the legislator of generations and the moral instructor of the world".Quoted in J. A. Carlson, England's First Family of Writers (2007) p. 267
It received its most memorable formulation however in Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1821 "A Defence of Poetry".I. Ousby ed., The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (1995) p. 245 Shelley maintained that, through their powers of imaginative understanding, 'Poets' (in the widest sense, of ancient Greece) were able to identify and formulate emerging socio-cultural trends; and were as a result "the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration...the unacknowledged legislators of the world".Quoted in M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1971) p. 332
Modernist irony
The grand claims of the Romantics began to give way in the twentieth century to a more ironic stanceS. Chatterji, Memories of a Lost War (2001) p. 70 – Yeats speaking for his calling in general when he wrote "We have no gift to set a statesman right".W. B. Yeats, The Poems (1984) p. 155
What remained of the Shelley claim was to be further diminished by Postmodernism's distrust for grand narratives, if not perhaps destroyed entirely.Tools of the Sacred
See also
References