News at Eleven: There has never been much love lost

between politicians and poets, as the latter are by nature anti-establishment. Shelley called the government of the day in 1819:

Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.

A century or so later Auden wrote about the poet's role in relation to politics:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky

from The Sunday Times: If it's a great poem, then it's not about you, Gordon

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