The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Poets are, by the nature of their interests and the nature of artistic fabrication, singularly ill-equipped to understand pol­itics or economics. Their natural interest is in singular in­dividuals and personal relations, while politics and economics are concerned with large numbers of people, hence with the human average (the poet is bored to death by the idea of the Common Man) and with impersonal, to a great extent involuntary, relations. The poet cannot understand the func­tion of money in modern society because for him there is no relation between subjective value and market value; he may be paid ten pounds for a poem which he believes is very good and took him months to write, and a hundred pounds for a piece of journalism which costs him but a day's work. If he is a successful poet—though few poets make enough money to be called successful in the way that a novelist or play­wright can—he is a member of the Manchester school and believes in absolute laisser-faire; if he is unsuccessful and em­bittered, he is liable to combine aggressive fantasies about the annihilation of the present order with impractical day­dreams of Utopia. Society has always to beware of the Utopias being planned by artists manques over cafeteria tables late at night.

All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, con­flagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.

In a war or a revolution, a poet may do very well as a guerilla fighter or a spy, hut it is unlikely that he will make a good regular soldier, or, in peace time, a conscientious member of a parliamentary committee.

All political theories which, like Plato's, are based on analogies drawn from artistic fabrication are bound, if put into practice, to turn into tyrannies. The whole aim of a poet, or any other kind of artist, is to produce something which is complete and will endure without change. A poetic city would always con­tain exactly the same number of inhabitants doing exactly the same jobs for ever.

Moreover, in the process of arriving at the finished work, the artist has continually to employ violence. A poet writes:

The mast-high anchor dives through a cleft changes it to

The anchor dives through closing paths changes it again to

The anchor dives among hayricks

and finally to

The anchor dives through the floors of a church.

A cleft and closing paths

have been liquidated, and hay­ricks deported to another stanza.

A society which was really like a good poem, embodying the aesthetic virtues of beauty, order, economy and sub­ordination of detail to the whole, would be a nightmare of horror for, given the historical reality of actual men, such a society could only come into being through selective breed­ing, extermination of the physically and mentally unfit, abso­lute obedience to its Director, and a large slave class kept out of sight in cellars.

Vice versa, a poem which was really like a political democ­racy—examples, unfortunately, exist—would be formless, windy, banal and utterly boring.

There are two kinds of political issues, Party issues and Revo­lutionary issues. In a party issue, all parties are agreed as to the nature and justice of the social goal to be reached, but differ in their policies for reaching it. The existence of dif­ferent parties is justified, firstly, because no party can offer irrefutable proof that its policy is the only one which will achieve the commonly desired goal and, secondly, because no social goal can be achieved without some sacrifice of individual or group interest and it is natural for each individ­ual and social group to seek a policy which will keep its sacri­fice to a minimum, to hope that, if sacrifices must be made, it would be more just if someone else made them. In a party issue, each party seeks to convince the members of its society, primarily by appealing to their reason; it marshals facts and arguments to convince others that its policy is more likely to achieve the desired goal than that of its opponents. On a party issue it is essential that passions be kept at a low temperature: effective oratory requires, of course, some appeal to the emo­tions of the audience, but in party politics orators should dis­play the mock-passion of prosecuting and defending attorneys, not really lose their tempers. Outside the Chamber, the rival deputies should be able to dine in each other's houses; fanatics have no place in party politics.