Politics

This chapter begins with what is almost a legendary source for discussions of literature and politics, the moment when Socrates in Plato's dialogue The Republic decides that most poets should be banished from the well-ordered state. One answer to these questions comes from understanding the conception of politics that pervades Enzensberger's "Poetry and Politics" and provides the necessary counterpoint to his notion of the resistant poem. This chapter might overeagerly want to conflate these two remarks and find in them evidence of another, affirmative relation between literature and politics. The early twenty-first century world is lighter, faster, becoming more peaceful and less prone to imagine the relation between literature and politics in terms of the antagonism between the sinister powers of the state and the writer's heroic commitment to freedom.