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Written by: Kamran Mofid

Published: 12 November 2024

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Teachers as Poets: The Architects of the Transformational Change

Reclaim Your Heart and Discover Your Soul

Nota bene

‘We become teachers for the reasons of the heart.

But many of us lose heart as time goes by.

How can we take heart, alone and together,

So we can give heart to our students and our world,

Which is what good teachers do?'-THE HEART OF A TEACHER

‘Humanity is at the core of what a poem is. It is meaning, empathy, revelation, inversion, dissidence, passion, and surprise: poetry is what happens in the space between logic and chaos.’- Joelle Taylor, poet, playwright and author

Whilst the forces of fakery, arrogance, loneliness, violence, indifference, rejection, physical and mental disabilities, injustice, and inhumanity are real and cannot be denied, so are the powers of human authenticity, generosity, kindness, empathy, humility, dignity, understanding, courage, and community that are rising up to meet them, challenging them, providing better paths to this journey we call life.

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Written by: Kamran Mofid

Published: 06 November 2024

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Poet for the Common Good Who Spoke Truth to Power

N.B. Not long ago, I posted a Blog, In Search of Meaning and Purpose: The Poets' Guide to Economics, shedding light on how to humanise economics and the economists in order to build a better world.

Today, I have tasked myself to shed light on political poetry, on ‘The Poets’ Guide to Politics’, if you will, to explore the political power of poetry and its capacity to inspire social change. To achieve this goal, I have allowed myself to be inspired and guided by the political poetry and poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who remains ‘one of the most celebrated and influential figures of the Romantic era in English literature. He is recognised for his passionate, lyrical poetry, often infused with intense emotion and radical political ideals. Shelley's work explores themes of love, beauty, nature, and the pursuit of freedom and justice’, all amongst the missing values in this chaotic world of our creation.

Shelley: An Icon of Liberation

Shelley, the poet of moral and political corruption, speaking prophetically to our age

Poet As Prophet: Shelley, People’s Poet

Sociopolitical poetry: Evoking understanding, sympathy, empathy, challenging the Status Quo, and inspiring resistance,  mobilisation, dialogue and collective action for social change 

This painting of Shelley by William Edward West, was done days before he drowned off

the coast of Italy Credit: University of Virginia Libraries  

I look forward to a day when school children,  college and university students are required to study creativity and be inspired by poets, artists, mystics, musicians, sculptors, philosophers of love, and peacemakers. I look forward to a day when they start their day by reciting poetry,to bring meaning and purpose into their study, grounding them in the realities of what it means to be human. I dream of a time when their textbooks, as well as addressing how they may become good workers in the marketplace, would also speak of the need for beauty, kindness, empathy, justice, cooperation, enoughness, frugality, simplicity, friendship, fairness, community and love, on who and what we are, and what is the meaning and purpose of this journey we call life. Yes, indeed, to my mind, this is the true meaning of what a good, values-led education is all about. Carpe diem! 

“…poets are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of law, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world with is called religion”.

“A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth . . . the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator.” 

“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley “one of the best artists of us all; I mean in workmanship of style”-William Wordsworth

Shelly, one of Britain’s most significant political essayists,“the relentless enemy of all irresponsible authority, especially the irresponsible authority which derives from wealth and exploitation”, as Paul Foot, whose 1981 work Red Shelley helped restore the significance of Shelley’s political work, observed.

‘Living precariously as an itinerant writer, Shelley found his home instead on the radical edge of British politics, a crusader against moral and political corruption, a campaigner for republicanism and parliamentary reform, for equal rights and the abolition of slavery, for free speech and a free press, for Irish freedom and Catholic emancipation, for freedom of religion and freedom from religion.’

Shelley: Prophet of the New World

“Shall rank corruption pass unheeded by,

Shall flattery’s voice ascend the wearied sky;

And shall no patriot tear the veil away

Which hides these vices from the face of day?

Is public virtue dead? – is courage gone?”

‘No, not a description of the moral void of contemporary Britain, but lines from Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, an excoriation of the moral devastation wreaked in late Georgian Britain two centuries ago. It was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley and published anonymously in 1811, in support of the radical Irish journalist Peter Finnerty, who had been imprisoned for seditious libel after accusing the Anglo-Irish politician Viscount Castlereagh of the torture and executions of Irish rebels challenging British rule.’

As Kenan Malik, writing in the Guardian to mark the bicentenary of  Shelly’s passing has noted,‘ Shelley’s greatest gift was in the deftness with which he interwove the poetical and the political. Poetry had, for Shelley, of necessity to appropriate a political dimension. And politics required a poetical imagination. That was why, as Shelley put it in a celebrated line from his essay A Defence of Poetry, “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”...

‘Shelley’s first significant work – 'The Necessity of Atheism' – published in his first year at Oxford, led to his expulsion from the university and strained his relationship with his father to breaking point. Living precariously as an itinerant writer, Shelley found his home instead on the radical edge of British politics, a crusader against moral and political corruption, a campaigner for republicanism and parliamentary reform, for equal rights and the abolition of slavery, for free speech and a free press, for Irish freedom and Catholic emancipation, for freedom of religion and freedom from religion.

His political ideals were often contradictory, his revolutionary spirit clashing with his Fabian instincts for gradual, non-violent change. Yet, unlike fellow Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley never abandoned his radicalism, his disdain of authority or his celebration of the voices of working people…

‘Despised by the literary and political establishments, Shelley wrote for the working-class autodidacts for whom learning and culture were means both of elevating themselves and of challenging those in power. Fearful of the consequences, his work was suppressed by the authorities, either through direct censorship or through threatening publishers with the charge of sedition.

‘As a result, much of Shelley’s work was published only after his death. The Masque of Anarchy is perhaps the most famous political poem in the English language, written in furious anger after the Peterloo massacre of 1819, when at least 15 people were killed as cavalry charged into a crowd of around 60,000 who had gathered to demand parliamentary reform and an extension of suffrage. Shelley sent it to his friend, the radical editor and publisher Leigh Hunt. But Hunt did not publish it, for to do so would have been to invite immediate imprisonment for sedition. Not until 1832 was the poem, with its celebrated last stanza, finally published:

“Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number –

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you –

Ye are many – they are few.”

In the decades that followed Shelley’s death, his poetry became an inspiration across generations and borders. Queen Mab became known as the Chartists’ Bible, read aloud at working-class meetings. The Suffragettes’ slogan, “Deeds, not words”, is taken from The Masque of Anarchy. And that final stanza has been on the lips of many who have “shaken their chains”, from striking Jewish garment workers in early 20th-century New York to protesters 80 years later in Tiananmen Square and a century later in Tahrir Square.

And most of all, perhaps, it is in his insistence that we question the claim to power of those in authority that we most need Shelley’s voice today. For, as he put it in Queen Mab:

“Nature rejects the monarch, not the man;

The subject, not the citizen…

… and obedience,

Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,

Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame

A mechanized automaton.”

All the above excerpts from Kenan Malik’s article. 

Get to know Shelley better HERE

Read more articles and reflections on Shelley HERE

Moments of joy, inner peace, and reflection: Read Shelley’s Poems and Discover Goodness, Beauty, and Wisdom

'Percy Bysshe Shelley remains one of the most celebrated and influential figures of the Romantic era in English literature. He is recognized for his passionate, lyrical poetry, often infused with intense emotion and radical political ideals. Shelley's work explores themes of love, beauty, nature, and the pursuit of freedom and justice.

His poetry is characterized by its flowing rhythms, vibrant imagery, and exploration of philosophical and metaphysical ideas. Shelley's writing frequently challenges societal norms and embraces revolutionary concepts, reflecting the spirit of the Romantic movement's emphasis on individualism, imagination, and rebellion against tradition.

Shelley's contemporaries included other prominent Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lord Byron. These poets shared a deep connection with nature, a focus on subjective experience, and a commitment to exploring the power of human emotions. They collectively shaped the literary landscape of their time and continue to inspire generations of readers and writers with their exploration of the human condition.'

Read Shelley's Poems HERE

A timeless example of Shelley's poetry speaking truth to power

‘Anarchy in Peterloo: Shelley's poem unmasked’

 ‘Peterloo Massacre, Manchester, print published by Richard Carlile’/Via The Guardian 

‘On 16 August 1819, a crowd of more than 50,000 gathered at St Peter's Fields outside Manchester to support parliamentary reform. The radical orator Henry Hunt was to speak in favour of widening the franchise and reforming Britain's notoriously corrupt system of political representation. Magistrates ordered the Manchester Yeomanry to disperse the demonstration. The cavalry charged the crowd, sabres drawn, and at least 15 people, including a woman and a child, were killed.

The businessman John Taylor, who had witnessed the aftermath, went on to set up the Manchester Guardian in response. It was via newspapers, almost a month later, that Percy Bysshe Shelley, living in Italy, found out about what became known as the Peterloo massacre. "The torrent of my indignation," as he put it, flowed into The Masque of Anarchy, a poem devised to be accessible to a wide readership but doomed not to reach it…

Running to 91 stanzas, the poem is a prophetic dream, an apocalyptic vision of Regency Britain and the shaky legitimacy of its ruling class. In the first part, the nation's leading politicians parade like monsters, leading the figure of Anarchy around on a white horse to trample the multitudes. In this vision, the true anarchists are Britain's rulers, who delight in fear and disorder. Anarchy's followers, who include lawyers and priests, take possession of the palace and parliament. They are challenged only by a "maniac maid" called Hope, though "she looked more like Despair"...

The Masque of Anarchy

The first nine stanzas annotated

As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the Sea,
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.

The poem is a dream, like the dream visions in Chaucer or Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Yet in the first verse we also have the sense of Shelley being woken from the unreality of his life in Italy.

I met Murder on the way -
He had a mask like Castlereagh -
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

Viscount Castlereagh, leader of the Tories in the Commons, was a spokesman for the harsh measures of political repression that followed the Peterloo massacre. Note that "Murder" is like Castlereagh, not the other way round: individual politicians are reduced to personifications of eternal vices.

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed the human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Shelley's friend Leigh Hunt praised his "union of ludicrousness with terror" – as in this blending of apocalyptic vision with pantomime.

Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

Lord Eldon was lord chancellor. He decided the fate of Shelley's children by his first wife, Harriet, after her suicide – refusing Shelley custody because of his "immoral and vicious" principles. Eldon was renowned for weeping even as he pronounced the harshest of sentences.

And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them.

A stanza echoed in WH Auden's Epitaph on a Tyrant: "when he cried the little children died in the streets".

Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.

Viscount Sidmouth was home secretary and defended the Peterloo massacre. He evokes shadows because he was in charge of the government's secret service, and is "clothed with the Bible" because of his apparent piety: he was an advocate of church building.

And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

A typical Shelley list, the "spies" recalling Sidmouth's network of informers.

Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

Shelley explicitly evokes the Book of Revelation: the three British lords and Anarchy are the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw -
'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!'

Like the Mark of the Beast in Revelation on the one who is King of Kings, and Lord of Lords.’

The above excerpts are from an article by John Mullan via The Guardian 8 July 2013

A must-read book

‘The Masque of Anarchy, a profound political poem written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in response to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, is a powerful call for nonviolent resistance against oppression. This poem, composed in the wake of tragic events that shook England, vividly depicts the horrors of tyranny and the hope of freedom. Shelley’s words inspire unity, courage, and peaceful defiance in the face of anarchy, murder, and corruption. With striking imagery and a message that resonates across generations, *The Masque of Anarchy* is as relevant today as it was during the era of its creation.

Published originally in 1832, this work marks a significant contribution to both the literary and political landscape of the 19th century. It offers readers a glimpse into Shelley’s vision of justice and equality, wrapped in a poetic style that is accessible yet profound. The poem's vivid characters, such as the personified figures of Anarchy, Murder, and Hope, continue to capture the imagination and fuel the fight for societal change.’-Leopold Classic Library

A must listen podcast

Political Poems: 'The Masque of Anarchy' by Percy Bysshe Shelley

'Shelley’s angry, violent poem was written in direct response to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819, in which a demonstration in favour of parliamentary reform was attacked by local yeomanry, leaving 18 people dead and hundreds injured. The ‘masque’ it describes begins with a procession of abstract figures – Murder, Fraud, Hypocrisy – embodied in members of the government, before eventually unfolding into a vision of England freed from the tyranny and anarchy of its institutions. As Mark and Seamus discuss in this episode, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, with its incoherence and inconsistencies, amounts to perhaps the purest expression in verse both of Shelley’s political indignation and his belief that, with the right way of thinking, such chains of oppression can be shaken off ‘like dew’. 

Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.

Listen to the podcast HERE

This is why it is so vital to speak truth to power today:

My pertinent question is: Would they have been different people, would they have acted differently, if they had been educated differently, with different values, ethos and emphasis? My own answer is an emphatic YES, given my nearly 50 years of teaching experience.

The Theft of the Century by the Most 'Educated Thieves'- All with MBAs and PhDs!

Britain Has Become a Sinking Ship of Systemic Corruption, Cronyism and Chumocracy

Calling all academic economists: What are you teaching your students?

Poetry to inspire us to become instrument of change, enabled and empowered to build a better world

In Search of Meaning and Purpose: The Poets' Guide to Economics

Reflecting on Life: My Childhood in Iran where the love of poetry was instilled in me

Poetry is the Education that Nourishes the Heart and Nurtures the Soul

World in Chaos and Despair: The Healing Power of Poetry