1 Global Leadership Portraits Visions for the Future The Poet’s Vision and the Promise of World Peace by Suheil Bushrui
Without high virtues by poetry laid down No glorious deed by man can be achieved. —Abu Tammam Translated by the author from the original Arabic
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. —Percy Bysshe Shelly From A Defense of Poetry I said the poets hung Images of the life that was in Eden About the child-bed of the world, that it, Looking upon those images, might bear Triumphant children —William Butler Yeats From The King’s Threshold
I The great poets, for as long as we remember, have been the true leaders of humanity. Their vision was always the inspiration for the great spiritual conquests of the human race, the triumph of the spirit before which all other values are non-existent. The poet’s leadership, therefore, is vindicated against what one poet calls “the reasoners and merchants” and of the “unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty”. How true in today’s social and political climate is this claim of the poet, for the greatest poetry can never compromise the Truth. The political discourse has dominated for too long all discussion – national and international – emphasizing the so-called “realities of time and place”, and employing in research the quantitative and empirical methods that have not yielded many positive results. The power of the word, the power of poetry, and the power of literature survive both time and place. Emphasizing this fact, one of the great poets of the twentieth century expressed his belief that: …literature is the principal voice of the conscience, and it is its duty age after age to affirm its morality against the special moralities of