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Community Development Journal 2007 42(4):422-424; doi:10.1093/cdj/bsm033
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© Adrienne Rich. Reproduced by kind permission from "Poetry and Commitment; an Essay", WW Norton & Company

Legislators of the world

Adrienne Rich

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

In ‘The Defence of Poetry’ 1821, Shelley claimed that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. This has been taken to suggest that simply by virtue of composing verse, they exert some exemplary moral power, in a vague unthreatening way. In fact, in his earlier political essay, ‘A Philosophic View of Reform’, he had written that ‘Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged’, etc. The philosophers, he was talking about, were revolutionary-minded: Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Voltaire and Mary Wollstonecraft.

In addition, Shelley was, no mistake, out to change the legislation of his time. For him, there was no contradiction between poetry, political philosophy and active . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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