The Specialness of Poetry
Special claims have always been made about poetry. For Plato, poetry carried a special danger: its imaginative and rhetorical projections had the potential to corrupt the citizens of the Republic by leading them away from what is good and true. For other thinkers, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, poetry has a special moral force that must be recognized as necessary to society, even when the political efficacy of individual poems is not obvious or immediate. Theodor W. Adorno argued that the uniquely “virginal” expression of an individual lyric poem implies a protest against a social situation we cannot but feel as oppressive.