Indeed, the poet can best ‘speak truth to power’ when speaking from a non-partisan position. Being socially engaged, negotiating and renegotiating meaning, values, and allegiances are all options, but not responsibilities. Yeats’) and as President Kennedy urged, ‘Society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.’ The poet’s objective is to remain creatively free. Auden said, ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’ (poem ‘In Memory of W. Poetry, in contrast, does not have as its primary objective to secure or even to change anything. Where conflicts arise between interests, or where concerns transcend national boundaries, diplomats are tasked with seeking compromise and counterbalance, where possible though inclusive (win-win) solutions. With regard to aims, the driving objective of diplomacy is security: securing peace (or in the case of war, terms of engagement), securing territorial integrity, securing agreements, securing information (both in the sense of obtaining and defending), and ultimately, securing a country’s best interests. This similarity notwithstanding, there are some important differences over why and how poetry and diplomacy engage in the process of redress. This may, in turn, influence how they act. In diplomacy, the power of words to shape the world we live in is more evident and probably more far-reaching, but both professions use language in order to engage and maybe even alter the way people see the world. In poetry, this is often at a personal level, although national sensibilities have also been shaped by individual poets, just as they have by topics such as British poems on WW1. This creative process of imagining a counterbalance to anomalies and potential injustices in the status quo is called ‘redress’ by the Irish Nobel laureate, Seamus Heaney ( The Redress of Poetry and Crediting Poetry). Recasting the narrative of deadlocked negotiations in order to find common values is an art that resembles poetry, both in its questioning of the dominant order and in its ability to imagine an alternative one. This is because values, in being both aspirational and abstract, can give players something to agree to (we all want a better world for our children), while avoiding the charge of having compromised themselves by reaching a compromise. Where agreement cannot be reached in the here and now because the gulf between positions is too great, shared values may offer a bridge. However, these self-same attributes come back into play when the diplomat is faced with a negotiation impasse. In this respect, poetry and diplomacy differ with regard to function, flexibility, and creativity. Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’), diplomats tend to embody and enact the values of the country they represent. Imagine a magic capsule which, when consumed, releases a great amount of energy and motivation, endowing individuals with enhanced powers and giving communities a heightened sense of purpose and identity. Values are just such an Asterix & Obelix potion, which explains the central role of ethos in religious, cultural, and corporate circles.Īt the same time, values remain elusive things which none of us can readily define: What exactly are honour, dignity, honesty, and integrity, and do these words mean the same to different people? Perhaps this slipperiness is indeed a central part of the power of values: Even though we cannot pin them down, all of us intuitively understand them, most of us live by them, and some of us are even willing to die for them.īoth poets and diplomats see values as potential game changers, but whereas poets often question values by challenging received wisdom (e.g. In this posting, I nevertheless suggest that there are several common denominators between poetry and diplomacy that are worth exploring. Diplomacy is devoid of poetry unless, that is, we count the alliteration in President Trump’s ‘fire and fury’ and ‘locked and loaded’ sabre rattling.Ĭonversely, few diplomats have the time to write poetry while in service: the days of diplomats as Nobel laureates are long gone. African Digital Diplomacy and GovernanceĬan poetry help diplomacy? A joke, surely! Poetry and diplomacy are worlds apart and have nothing in common other than using language as a medium.
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