What's Poetry's Role in Protest Politics?

That's the question recently posed by the Guardian.

From the piece...

Last week's images of mounted policemen charging the protesters around Parliament Square evoked multiple memories: the poll tax riots in John Major's 90s; the angry young of Brixton and Toxteth in Thatcher's 80s; even, for the historically minded, the Peterloo massacre in 1819, where magistrates sent in cavalry to disperse a crowd of over 60,000 who had gathered to protest for political reform.

Shortly after the massacre, in which several were killed and several hundred injured, Thomas Love Peacock wrote of it to his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley in Italy. Shelley was so moved by Peacock's description of the events that he responded by penning The Masque of Anarchy, a poem that advocates both radical social action and non-violent resistance: "Shake your chains to earth like dew / Which in sleep had fallen on you- / Ye are many — they are few".

At times of upheaval and unrest, is poetry's role to fan the flames or cool tempers? Down the centuries it has proved remarkably effective at both. Against a background of civil unrest in 1970s America, Gil Scott-Heron told the world "you will not be able to stay home, brother". In his searing, satirical masterpiece "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" on the album Small Talk at 125th and Lennox. Scott-Heron offers a line in tightly-wrought comic surrealism; "The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary." But it is as much his delivery, his voice impassioned but not quite righteous, that electrifies the poem.