Literature and Politics

Abstract

Let us begin with a poem entitled ‘Politics’:

How can I, that girl standing there,

My attention fix

On Roman or on Russian

Or on Spanish politics?

Yet here’s a travelled man that knows

What he talks about,

And there’s a politician

That has read and thought,

And maybe what they say is true

Of war and war’s alarms,

But O that I were young again

And held her in my arms!

(W. B. Yeats, 1938)

On the face of it, here is a poem that directly articulates some intrinsic oppositions between the proper business of literature and the proper business of politics. Literature deals with the eternal and universal — age and death, sexual desire and its waning — while politics deals with the temporary and the historically conditioned — the Russian Revolution, Italian fascism and the Spanish Civil War. The poet is on one side, the politician on the other.