Collection

Political Poems

Poets lend voices to current events and elections as they critique and defend the social and political issues of their day.

BY The Editors

Photograph of the Lincoln Memorial at night
Photograph courtesy of Daniel Mennerich via Flickr

Plato wanted to banish poets from his Republic because they can make lies seem like truth. Shelley thought poets were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” and Auden insisted that “poetry makes nothing happen.” This collection of poems point to the many different kinds of political poems, and the reasons for writing them.

Ushering In: U.s. Inaugural Poems
JFK requested Frost, Clinton invited Angelou and Miller, and Obama asked Alexander: read the four poems that have been read at presidential inaugurations.
  • I know there’s something better down the road.
    We need to find a place where we are safe.
    We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
  • But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
    Come, you may stand upon my
    Back and face your distant destiny,
  • Something we were withholding made us weak
    Until we found out that it was ourselves
  • But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how
    except in the minds of those who will call it Now?
Looking Back To Look Ahead: American Dreams
Poems about democracy, freedom, wonder, and other ideals that have survived centuries.
  • I’m the cranky President sneaking away
    to swim in the Potomac.
  • and I am waiting
    for the lost music to sound again
    in the Lost Continent
    in a new rebirth of wonder
  • Listen to the music of centuries,
    Rising above the mushroom time.
  • Let your laughter come free
    remembering looking toward peace:
    “We must disenthrall ourselves.”
The View From Washington
Presidents and senators strut into the nation's capitol and tower monumentally over the masses.
For The Love Of Country: Passionate Critique
These poets reveal the difficulties of the present and hope for different futures.
Making Nothing Happen: Poetry And Politics
In spite of Auden’s pragmatic truism, poetry insists on a life in politics.
  • The poets are going home
    To the blood-haunted villages,
  • We can-
    not extricate
    a place from those


    it’s made of,
  • I think that if my tongue alone could talk
    it would swear
    in any court that poetry
    tastes like the iodine in blood,
  • You said to me that day,
    “There’s nothing you can do,”
    and spoke of Auden’s line:
    “Poetry makes nothing happen.”
  • Is peace merely a vacuum, the negative
    Of creation, or the absence of war?
    The teaching says Peace is a positive energy.
    Still something in me resists that sweet milk,
Unofficial Documents: Homage And Satire
Poems that poke fun at official rhetoric, update beloved national texts, and present political allegories.
Articles And Blog Posts
Five poets try to determine what makes a poem political.
  • I suspect that one could posit that poets who shatter how we engage the world through the rupture of language, for instance, are engaged in a political act.
  • Two very different new books, one by Naomi Shihab Nye and one by Kent Johnson, turn epistolary toward remarkably similar and fierce political ends.
  • what is a political poem today and how do we describe, experience, understand the intimate balance going on between information, sentiment and aesthetics that determines how we read a poem and whether it even seems political to us
  • It’s true that I do not usually sit down to write about something, but more and more I want poems to be about something—something important and meaningful—and I want poetry not just to be something or be about something but to do something.
  • For myself, I am always asking: how can poetry effectively address political issues (particularly related to the decolonization of my home island of Guåhan)? At the same time, I ask: how can poetry and poets engage with the public and political sphere beyond the page/book?
Prose From poetry Magazine
Robert Archambeau and Daisy Fried respond to essays on politics and poetry by David Orr and David Biespiel.
  • Rare is the poet who doesn't view himself as deeply invested in political life, and yet the sloppy, compromised, and frequently idiotic business of democracy—which is, for all its flaws, the way most political changes occur in this country—rarely attracts the attention of our best poets. Is this the inevitable order of things?
  • I have been working on a book that tries to pull together some kind of answer to the question Orr poses. If I'm lucky, all my rooting around in dingy archives in pursuit of an answer will also produce a thesis or two on a related question, one raised not long ago in a post by Lucia Perillo on the Poetry Foundation's "Harriet" blog: why are contemporary poets generally aligned with the political left?
  • America’s poets have a minimal presence in American civic discourse and a minuscule public role in the life of American democracy. I find this condition perplexing and troubling—both for poetry and for democracy.
  • Is Biespiel advocating for more politics in poems? Fewer arguments about poetics for the good of the nation? Arguments about poetics are good for poetry. And have nothing whatsoever to do with public life, whether your poetics are politically-grounded or not.
Essay On Poetic Theory
  • There are bosses in poetry as well as in the industrial empire and everything else, and what I want to talk to you about today is simply that—how to manage yourself in your own individual way, I guess, since no poet who’s worthy of the term doesn’t.
Poetry Off The Shelf Podcasts