Form and State

What your poetry preferences say about you

Forget books. Poetry is the best way to understand subtle political differences. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, as Shelley wrote in 1822. Yes, it’s fine to listen to the podcasts about the books. But if you want truly to “get” liberalism, conservatism, socialism, libertarianism, labor, you have to understand their structure. Each has a poetic form. To wit:

Conservatism is the heroic couplet, the pentameter quatrain, pretty much any stanza you would find in a 19^th century British poetry volume, plus Longfellow. Does it have a standard meter and (except for blank verse) a formal rhyme scheme? Then it is solid, conservative, inherited form with all its accumulated wisdom, practiced with scrupulous fidelity. Conservatives believe working within traditional institutional constraints produces better outcomes than abandoning them. Institutions provide balance, closure. Think of Oakeshott’s “To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried...”

Yet while the heroic couplet is excellent for satire and order, it can become predictable. A state that runs entirely on tradition risks paralysis. The “wisdom” of inherited form may become a prison. Blank verse already anticipates the concerns of too much anticipating rhyme. Think of Burke’s “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.” Deviation from established patterns requires justification.

Constitutional democracy, now conservative, really, is the sonnet: a form so capacious it contains multitudes while still maintaining structural integrity. Sonnets are a flexible form of government. The octave-sestet division mirrors the separation of powers, the volta enacts the necessary turn from problem to resolution, from grievance to redress. The form has adapted across cultures and centuries because its constraints are more productive than restrictive. You can write a Petrarchan sonnet or a Shakespearean one, it can even be 13 lines or 15 and still be recognizably a sonnet. A sonnet innovates. It has survived being declared dead every few generations.

Social democracy, also by now largely conservative, is the ode. It is Pindaric in ambition, highly structured, and celebratory of collective achievement. Unlike the ballad, which can be private and vengeful, the ode is public and serves a civic function, binding the community together. But, as Willy Brandt noted, nothing comes to us without effort. Odes are a demanding form, requiring effort, requiring a certain public solemnity.

Centrism, also a kind of conservatism, is blank verse.

Liberalism is free verse. There are no rules (we are tolerant!) except of course there are rules. Free verse relies on the pretense of “natural” speech, claiming to have liberated itself from the tyranny of inherited forms, to have abandoned the old constraints. Yet both free verse and liberalism depend on an internalized sense of the older structures they position themselves against. Like the poetry of Whitman, liberalism depends on a phantom limb sensation, an internalized memory of the structures it claims to have transcended. Both require eternal vigilance, invisible maintenance, to prevent everything from dissolving into mush or anarchy. Both lack the safety net of obvious structure.¹

Labor is the ballad, the blues, and folk songs generally: the oral archive of workers, lovers, and their struggles, in a mnemonic structure that survived without a printing press, and with (think Joe Hill’s Little Red Songbook, portable enough to fit in a worker’s pocket). Folk songs are the people’s songs. The ballad is designed specifically to remember. Ballads memorialize specific crimes of specific people but have more energy than elegies. Think Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”

Populism is of course the limerick: memorable, rhythmically aggressive, usually vulgar, and immediately gratifying. The limerick resists complexity. You cannot write a limerick about nuanced trade policy. The limerick demands a punchline, usually at someone’s expense.

Socialism is the villanelle, a strict form that started out simply as a rustic song but acquired a set structure of five three-line stanzas and a quatrain, obsessively returning to the same refrains (collective ownership, worker solidarity). The power of the villanelle comes from always circling back, the repeated lines accumulating new meaning in new contexts. It is always returning to the people, to the community, with hammering rhyme and repetition. The slogans keep coming back whether you want them to or not.

The Green Party is the pastoral elegy, a form of mourning for a lost landscape. Grief turns into consolation, though the grief part can take a long time. Pastoral elegies are all about nature’s sympathy with human suffering. They gather the mourners, catalog what has been destroyed by the intrusion of the city, and attempt to find some way forward. Beware the pathetic fallacy, the belief that the weather cares about your vote.

Libertarianism is erasure poetry, where meaning is created by the removal of existing structures, regulations, and laws until only the essential text remains. I should restate this in active voice: libertarianism is the heroic individual poet rejecting social constraints, leaving essence. The problem with libertarianism is that the heroic individual poet cannot start with a blank page. So individuality and freedom have to come from rejecting. (Think Galt’s Gulch, where everything is scavenged from the dying world.) Think of Nozick’s “Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them without violating their rights.” Libertarians don’t want to be constrained by line length or rhyme scheme, though they secretly like the heroic couplet.

Fascism has no poetry. It is Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto, borrowing the intensity of poetry while rejecting the deliberative constraints of form: “courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.” (He also says “the poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements,” which seems a little Epstein-ish to me.) He also declares “we will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind,” basically rejecting the stanza. The state is not a night-watchman under fascism, per Mussolini. Rather, it is all-presence. There can be no poetry under these circumstances.

Also:

The Administrative State is the sestina: six words cycling through six stanzas in a fixed rotation, gathered up in an envoi, or a kind of executive summary at the end. The form doesn’t argue; it doesn’t persuade. It simply applies its rule, recursively. The sestina, not the sonnet, is Max Weber’s “iron cage.” In poetry, the power comes from the same elements returning in new positions, acquiring new meanings through new syntactic contexts. A word that was a noun becomes a verb; a term that meant one thing in stanza two means something else by stanza five. But the important thing is that the sestina form is indifferent to content. It will do what it does whatever you feed it, whether the six words are “love, death, time, moon, heart, night” or “tax, code, zone, permit, file, deny.”

Neoliberalism is Conceptual Poetry. It is 21^st-century appropriation, Kenneth Goldsmith retyping the New York Times and calling it art. The content or “message” is irrelevant. Value comes from innovation and circulation, from commodification. The “market” is the only thing that counts. If people buy it, it is poetry. If it sells, it is “true.”

Federalism is the ghazal: autonomous couplets joined by a refrain, each unit self-sufficient yet participating in a larger pattern. The poet’s signature appears in the final couplet like a state asserting its particularity within the union. The ghazal requires a delicate balance where the part must be as beautiful as the whole. Nothing needs to be subordinated for there to be coherence.

Do you want to check if my taxonomy is right? Ask an AI to make you an image of a political rally holding up a sign with the futurist manifesto or lines from Whitman or the blues and look what the crowd looks like. You are the poetry you like whether you like it or not.

1. Once years ago I dated a poet and my grandmother asked me if his poems rhymed. No, I said. End it, she said. She was right.