Writing - Poets and Kings

Time I chatted with Charles III. 

Why Poets Terrify Kings

Power has always had an uneasy relationship with poetry. Armies can be drilled, laws can be enforced, but poetry slips through cracks where swords cannot reach. Kings understand this better than anyone. They fear poets not because poets command battalions, but because they command language — and language can make people see the world differently. A throne rests not only on armies but on belief. And belief is the poet’s battlefield.

When Percy Bysshe Shelley declared that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” he was not being sentimental. He was describing a power deeper than decree. Poets legislate by shaping the imagination of nations, by naming what people feel before they can speak it themselves. They turn private longings into public voices. Kings may give orders, but poets give meaning — and meaning can undo any order.

History leaves us plenty of examples. Osip Mandelstam’s single poem mocking Stalin was enough to seal his fate. One short stanza frightened a dictator who commanded millions of soldiers and secret police. Why? Because a poem can travel mouth to mouth, heart to heart, untraceable and indestructible.

Kings tremble before poets because poets remind us that no authority is final. Where power seeks permanence, poetry whispers of change. Where rulers demand obedience, poetry stirs the imagination toward freedom. To read a poem deeply is to glimpse another way of being, another horizon — and once a horizon is seen, it cannot be unseen.

Poetry terrifies kings because kings can kill the poet, but they cannot kill the poem. The words remain, carried in memory, whispered in secret, rediscovered by another generation. Power seeks to silence; poetry insists on speaking. And in the long span of history, it is the poem, not the decree, that endures.

God Bless