Mark Francois reading all 70 lines of Tennyson’s Ulysses to a bunch of pensioners at a pro-Brexit conference while, across a corridor in the House of Commons, a panel of Tory MPs were wondering how to appeal to the under-35s, should have struck fear into our hearts. “I say to the European council, Brexit has gone on long enough. You will be facing perfidious Albion on speed. It would be better for us to face our separate futures with mutual respect,” the vice chair of the hardline Tory European Research Group said, before launching into Tennyson’s poem to demonstrate how completely unwavering he was. Yet who was frightened? I wasn’t. It was too funny; I was, in the Peter Cook coinage that has proven so useful for our times, sinking giggling into the sea.
I want to say politicians quoting poetry at any length over about four words never works, since it always amounts to puffed up, undisguised hubris. Thatcher entering Downing Street for the first time with the words of St Francis of Assisi (“Where there is discord, may we bring harmony”) is hard to describe, at least until someone invents a verb that is between cringing and retching. I guess you could parse the difference between that and Jeremy Corbyn doing Percy Bysshe Shelley at Glastonbury – at least he wasn’t accruing the noblest of human qualities to himself, or even talking about himself in the third person; rather, he was trying to empower his audience (“Ye are many, they are few”). But the sheer incongruousness of the language (“Rise, like lions after slumber / in unvanquishable number”) is a plain attempt to dignify your own political proposition with a glory conceived for something quite different. Most poetry is something other people should say about you, not something you should say about yourself.
There are exceptions, of course there are! Barack Obama singing Amazing Grace was fine – wonderful, even – because he was singing it. Gordon Brown’s 2004 conference speech, quoting the US academic James Stockinger (“It is the hands of others who tend us when we’re sick and lift us up when we fall; It is the hands of others who bring us into the world and who lower us into the earth”) was quite tearjerking, feeling towards a different, meta-political kind of sentiment, less “Vote for me, I know the answers,” and more “Love one another and we’ll figure it out.”
In a similarly affecting moment in 2011, the US republican Herman Cain successfully deployed a verse from the Donna Summer theme tune for Pokémon: The Movie 2000. “Life can be a challenge, life can seem impossible. It’s never easy when there’s so much on the line. But you and I can make a difference.” And that worked because, let’s just call it the element of surprise.
After a disaster, the solace of language is overriding, and even a politician wont to sound a bit golden-tongued can come across as sincere and moving with the right words. Ronald Reagan’s main legacy, putting aside his enthusiasm for the neoliberal world order that looks set to derail us all, was his speech after the Challenger disaster in 1986, in which seven men and women died in front of the world’s eyes. He sprinkled the second world war RAF poet John Gillespie Magee’s lines rather than quoting in full, but here they are: “Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, / And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; / Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth / Of sun-split clouds, and done a hundred things/ You have not dreamed of …” When politicians are momentarily bigger than politics, then they can meet poets with their heads up.
