Power of poetry not lost on the powerful, except in Australia

Tomorrow is World Poetry Day. What more appropriate time, then, to reflect on the role poetry plays in our national life?

There have been many great Australian poets, beloved by the public (if not always by the academy): Henry Lawson, Dorothea Mackellar, Judith Wright, A. D. Hope, Clive James, David Malouf and Les Murray among them. I have a soft spot for Banjo Paterson, the romantic balladeer of the bush. (I once got into trouble for reading his poetry during a dreary Senate estimates evening.)

John F. Kennedy understood the power of poetry and often punctuated speeches with quotes from much-loved verses.Credit: AP

Yet our rich poetic tradition has had little impact upon our political life, whether in platform rhetoric or parliamentary debate – which is strange, because what the political orator and the poet both seek to do is distil an idea or an image into words both moving and, at their greatest, immortal.

In other countries, great political oratory is often enriched by verse.

In America, the Kennedys were particularly keen on blending oratory and poetry. JFK’s inaugural speech quoted from the Book of Isaiah. On the night Martin Luther King was shot, Robert Kennedy recalled the anguish of his own brother’s assassination by invoking Aeschylus: “And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget/ Falls drop by drop upon the heart/ Until in our own despair, against our will/ Comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

Ronald Reagan brought his most moving speech – the address to the nation following the death of the Challenger astronauts – to a perfect finish with words from John Gillespie Magee Jr’s poem High Flight: “And so they slipped the surly bonds of earth/To touch the face of God.”

Australian poets (from left) Judith Wright, Clive James, Dorothea Mackellar and Les Murray.Credit:

In Britain, Churchill’s great wartime speeches clearly echo the cadences of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, which he had memorised as a schoolboy. Margaret Thatcher quoted the prayer of St Francis of Assisi as she first entered Downing Street in 1979.

A small number of Australian political figures have turned to poetry for pleasure, comfort and inspiration.

The most erudite of them was Sir Samuel Griffith, premier of Queensland in the 1880s and 1890s, leader of its colonial Liberal Party, and principal draftsman of the Constitution. Griffith became the first chief justice of Australia in 1903. Perhaps to relieve the boredom of presiding over the High Court, he amused himself by translating Dante’s Divine Comedy from the original 14th century Italian. Those were the days before the court had a permanent home; the judges led peripatetic lives between sittings in the state capitals. It was said by one wit that Griffith translated Inferno in Brisbane, Purgatory in Melbourne and Paradise in Sydney.

Robert Menzies, who closely identified with his Scottish heritage, loved the verse of Robbie Burns, and quoted from him extensively in his Forgotten People broadcasts. He occasionally illuminated his parliamentary speeches with verse. Remarkably, his reply to the 1947 budget included several stanzas of A. P. Herbert’s poem satirising the planned economy. At the parliamentary banquet for Elizabeth II in 1963, he famously charmed the young Queen with the words of the 17th century balladist Thomas Ford: “I did but see her passing by/And yet I love her till I die.” That may sound awkward to modern ears, but the times were different; an estimated three-quarters of the population did indeed turn out to catch a glimpse of the Queen “but passing by”.

Robert Menzies with the Queen in 1954.Credit: Fairfax photographic

As his extensive library reveals, Menzies was an avid collector of poetry. His daughter Heather Henderson tells us that the evening before a major speech, his habit was to read not government briefing papers, but poetry – to get the rhythms running through his mind, the better to find the right cadence on the morrow.

Menzies’ most intellectual minister, Paul Hasluck, published several volumes of poetry when he was a young man. They reveal a lover of nature and something of a tortured soul. They were republished as a collection in 1969 when he became Governor-General.

Poetry captured a moment of high political drama in July 1975. Rex Connor, a Labor colossus and minister for minerals and energy in the Whitlam government, had been accused by the opposition of dishonesty about unorthodox and possibly illegal attempts to raise a massive foreign loan to fund government-owned energy projects. In a defiant speech to the House of Representatives, Connor defended his folie de grandeur with verse:

“I fling in the face of the little men of the opposition the words of an old poem: ‘Give me men to match my mountains/ Give me men to match my plains/ Men with freedom in their vision/ And creation in their brains.’”

But verse was no shield to truth. Whitlam subsequently discovered that his minister had indeed misled both him and parliament. In the last great scandal of his government, Whitlam sacked Connor, giving Malcolm Fraser his grounds to block supply.

Sometimes, political leaders have turned to poetry on ceremonial occasions. The normally prosaic John Howard concluded the 2005 dawn service address at Anzac Cove with these unbearably sad lines, penned by a bereaved mother: “How shall I miss him! When from overseas/ The Anzacs come ’mid shouts of victory/ When eager voices answering smiles awake/ And hands press hands for old remembrance sake/ Full many a face will wear a mask of joy/ With heartstrings aching for the absent boy.”

The conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott once wrote a glorious essay about the abiding importance of poetry, The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind.

There should be more poetry in our national conversation, too.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.