IN 1821 Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote the essay "A Defence of Poetry", in which he argued that "to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good." He concluded with a flourish: "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
Shelley's much-quoted epithet appeared in the opening pages of the programme for the Poetry Parnassus, a festival which ran last week at London's Southbank centre as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Bringing together bards from nearly every Olympic nation, it was the world's largest gathering of poets and spoken-word MCs, with over 100 events ranging from more conventional poetry readings to performances and pop-up programmes on the Southbank itself.
The poets taking part in the festival included acclaimed stalwarts such as Seamus Heaney (Ireland) and Derek Walcott (Saint Lucia), alongside younger, relatively unknown figures, such as Laura Wihlborg from Sweden and Kayo Chingonyi, who was born in Zambia but raised in Britain. Among the colourful food carts scattered along the Southbank there was a "Poetry Takeaway" van, where poems were created by three speedy poets within ten minutes, and an inflatable London Underground carriage?tribute to the city's popular "Poems on the Underground" scheme?which doubled up as an open-air classroom for passers-by.
The mission of the festival was to broaden poetry's reach?to strip away what seems intimidating or exclusive about the form, and to reveal the ways poetry can be both transcendent and inclusive. The event which opened the Parnassus, the World Poetry Summit, was designed to highlight the ways that poetry can lend a voice to views on politics. The day-long summit featured talks?"Poetry and Money" and "Poetry and Elitism"?that touched upon such tricky questions as how to fund the arts (ie, whether to accept corporate sponsorship, the subject of the furore over the T.S. Eliot prize) and whether plans to make memorising poems in schools would inspire a love of poetry.
The views held at these talks were at once strong (voiced by Simon Armitage, a poet and curator of the Parnassus, John Kinsella, a poet who dropped out of the T.S. Eliot prize, and Neil Astley, editor of Bloodaxe Books, a top poetry publisher) and fairly uniform. This was a shame, and an apparent confirmation of George Orwell's view (cited by Mr Astley) that poetry "is, and must be, the cult of a few people."
This does not have to be the case. As Jude Kelly, the director of the Southbank centre, declared at the start of the Parnassus, "a poet's ability to speak truth is not tampered with how it does on the marketplace. This makes poetry something you trust." Though the absence of compensation is perhaps not the best metric of value, Ms Kelly's statement was a good reminder of how poetry exists at a remove from the grit and grind of ordinary life?and can be treasured for it. Shelley never earned any money from his essay; it was published posthumously in 1840. And yet it remains trusted, in a way that not all legislators are today.
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