Poetry and Democracy
Poetry & Democracy
“The first thing democracy requires is also the first thing poetry
requires, namely, imagination. Without it, it’s impossible to
envision either memorable speech or a State where the genius
of its people thrives in both personal and political freedom. Like
democracy, poetry is an ongoing experiment that tests its
readers’ ability to get the meanings of poems which convey ‘the main
things’ (Walt Whitman) in every new age . . .
. . . Thomas Jefferson proclaimed human equality as a
‘self-evident’ truth in The Declaration of Independence.
Inherent in this truth is the secular belief in the citizenry’s collective
capacity to wed their imaginations to reason as both a political
ideal and spiritual safeguard against tyranny. However, this
intellectual marriage is always only the start of democracy.
Democracy’s maintenance is the hard part, requiring continuous
political balance on a high demotic wire in which citizens, despite
their party affiliations, strive to sustain their vision of themselves in
others, despite their ethnic, philosophical, and political differences,
and in so doing expand themselves within the matrix of diversity into
larger selves that, as Walt Whitman claimed, ‘contain multitudes’” .
- Chard deNiord
Poet Laureate of Vermont
at The 4 Freedoms Festival sm , July 2018
32
28 VERMONT
VERMONT
magazine
Magazine
FALL 2019