Poets' Warning by Dennis Hamley
On Black Wednesday just past, Alex, Kay's granddaughter, wrote a plaintive message on Facebook: Thanks, Donald, for spoiling my birthday. Couldn't be put better! I thought I'd already started my November blog. It was on a subject which, on Wednesday, I suddenly saw as a miserable and insignificant self-regarding piece of triviality and I had neither will nor energy to continue. I may return to it next month if the present fit wears off in time. I tried to think rationally about the disaster which took place on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning but couldn't, though I may be on the way to doing it now. I just wanted to express what I felt. But I didn't have the words. So I turned to poetry - other people's, not only because I can't write the stuff but because I believe, with Shelley in his A Defence of Poetry , that 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.' Why? Because, he memorably says (with the obtrusive ...