Jennifer Horgan: The Democratic Party failed to separate political language from poetry

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum 

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come 

W H Auden’s Funeral Blues came to my aid when I woke on Wednesday to the news of Donald Trump taking the first of the swing states. Few people may read poetry these days but that doesn’t make it worthless — far from it. Certainly, in moments of fear or joy or sadness, it is one of my closest friends.

I wanted to stop all the clocks, break from the mainland. I wanted to set my little boat off into new waters and start anew, and saying Auden’s words aloud helped. Poetry is a salve, it is “balm and manna,” to borrow from poet Louis McNeice. Poetry reflects us, each word a tiny piece of glass or tile, creating a kaleidoscope of human experience and feeling.

But poetry has its place. Poetic language is not politics, and all of us on the righteous Left need to remember that. Democrats have expected poetry to hold their messaging for far too long, and they are losing voters, particularly working-class voters.

Poetry should never be asked to hold a political message in the absence of fact and basic information — in the absence of straightforward communication with ordinary people. As Yeats put it: “When we argue with others, we are writing prose; when we argue with ourselves, we are writing poetry.” 

Political language must be more outward facing than poetry.

Democrats forget that. Speaking at a Detroit church before voters went to the ballot, Kamala Harris highlighted the determination among Americans to “bend the arc of history toward justice". 

“Here is what feeds my spirit as I travel across our beautiful nation from state to state and from church to church. I see faith in action in remarkable ways. I see a nation determined to turn the page on hatred and division and chart a new way forward," she continued.

What does any of this mean to someone who is angry about the price of eggs or about the thought of someone coming into their town to take their job? Not only does it mean nothing — it irritates, condescends. These people don’t need poetry. They don’t need metaphor and repetition. The cadence of language is not going to soothe them into doing good. They are afraid, and they want to feel safe.

Political language must get to those specifics, those nagging fears, the details of people’s actual lives in real time, through clear communication.

Trump and Elon Musk, the most powerful men in the world, make people feel safe with basic messaging. Tariffs. Walls. Make America Great Again. Their signs and symbols are simple, decipherable even to a small child. On top of this, they are gaining control of the media. X is straight out of an Orwell novel. These are very dark forces at work, and we must not overestimate the power of poetry, the might of metaphor, to thwart them. ‘Under his eye,’ Margaret Atwood’s novel reads. Three small words are enough to spell oppression.

And small children are not irrelevant to my point either. If we are unclear with children, we can do great harm indeed.

I had the great joy of listening to experts on childhood bereavement this week. They asked the room a very simple question: what does a child need when they are experiencing grief, possibly following an unexpected death?

We were told something obvious but true. They need facts. If a parent resorts to metaphor, the child will fill in the gaps with the most horrendous conclusions imaginable. If a parent says, “Daddy’s gone to sleep,” the child may imagine the worst. Has daddy gone to sleep because I tired him out with all my tantrums and complaining, the child may ask. Maybe the parent says, “Daddy has gone to heaven,” because it is more comforting. But where is heaven? Did Daddy go there because he didn’t like it here? Because he didn’t like me? Heaven might give comfort but children need more — they need clear messaging. They need fact, otherwise they can invent a far worse fiction.

So, what might we say to a bereaved child instead? We might say daddy died. His heart stopped working. It was nobody’s fault. We might invite the child to speak and grieve.

Through a reliance on poetry, we have made too much space for so-called “truth-tellers” like Trump, who stick to basic messaging, so basic it doesn’t even need to make sense. Democrats have made that space by not communicating clearly enough. Trump barely forms sentences, but it doesn’t matter. Eloquence is not what matters most to a lot of people. The price of living is.

The darker side of me believes the 2024 American election was lost because the world dislikes, possibly even hates, women. There is ample enough evidence — within America and far beyond it 

But it was also lost because of language. Poetry is not going to address global misogyny, any more than it can tackle inequality. It can only express the pain of it. Clear facts are needed to break down what misogyny looks like in real time — the beauty of that language is of secondary importance.

I was incredibly lucky to share two days with four poets last weekend, going through manuscripts in fine detail and launching into tangents on punctuation marks and etymology. Our small group met at ten in the morning and broke up after five on both days, exhausted and exhilarated. Kept hydrated by the indefatigable Patricia Looney of Cork City Libraries, we were carried along on one another’s flow. We were exactly where we wanted to be.

Renowned poet Theo Dorgan was our guide, sharing his wisdom and good humour throughout. Theo explained our jobs as poets as this: to make the language of the poem clear.

Dorgan’s advice is what got me thinking about this intersection between politics and language in the first place. Have they become too entangled? To the point where, yes, the language of the poetry is clear — the job of poetry is done — but what about the politics? Is the political message clear?

My guess is that it depends on who’s listening.

James Carville, the political consultant and author, said before the election that America would be “done in by the professional truth tellers,” adding that “Everybody’s opinion is not fucking equal.” That is the attitude that’s killing the Democrats. They assume stupidity too often, and they miss the point of politics. Everyone’s opinion matters in an election. You must therefore speak to everyone.

The Latino vote, for example, was of huge significance in this election. Over 36 million Latinos were eligible to participate in this vote, representing 15% of eligible voters. Their most pressing concern before the election was inflation and the cost of living. They were less interested in a metaphoric arc of history. That doesn’t make them stupid. It made them vote Republican, in greater numbers than previous elections.

John F Kennedy said that “if more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live". 

The true significance of his words is in separating politics and poetry out — in knowing the difference.