Power of Words

 The wonderful line by P.B. Shelley, "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" offers the poets and writers a powerful and impactful position. Generally, we regard poets as people living in a world of their own, an idyllic world. Not only this, many a great critics have often compared an artist or a poet with the mighty Creator since they also create a beautiful and serene world through their thoughtful pieces of work.

Reading between the lines, the works of our poets and writers, one may easily infer that the world they reflect actually is the one they want to substitute our real world with. Not only do they dream of a utopian society but also reveal the hypocrisies prevalent in our real world. Thus, offers the society a new way, a new thought to bring about the change. How do they do it? Which magical wand do they use to convey their messages to society. Of course, it is the power of words. From Geoffrey Chaucer to W.B Yeats, the poets have experimented with their language and many literary genres in order to make their stands more appealing to the common masses.

Poets: Language They Should Prefer

John Keats, Lord Tennyson, Lord Byron, Pablo Neruda, Charles Baudelaire, W.B. Yeats &  William Wordsworth are some names we generally hear from literary scholars or professors; but why is it so? The answer is- They didn’t write or compose for just a handful of readers but for each and every person who is a part of society. And for that matter, they preferred to write in the language of “everyman.”

William Wordsworth, indeed the favorite of everyone, devoted his Preface to Lyrical Ballads  to the kind of language a poet should use in order to relate even with a layman. He argues that a poetry should be composed in the language of common speech, not in lofty and ornamented diction that is generally termed as “poetic.”  We should not forget that the first aim of a poetry is to give pleasure to its readers and listeners through it’s beautifully expressed emotions wrapped in a language common to all. The poetry of love and hatred, violence and peace, justice and injustice are some such core topics of the humanity that are needed to be discussed including all the sects of the society.

There were times like the period of Renaissance when the poets and writers were more interested in displaying the vastness of their knowledge through their use of words, metaphors, similes, etc. To express their power of words they used to write using too powerful words to be grasped by a simple mind. Since at that period of time, education had its access only to a handful of people, poetry were generally composed in the praise of kings & queens and their kingdoms.

But as the time changed, things changed the focus of the poets shifted to the condition of the common man. They started taking interest in the drawing room of a common man rather than the courtroom of a king. Highly intellectual words were replaced with vernacular one.

The Effective Affect of Words

 

William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, is according to me, one of the best examples one can have as the best mixture of apt words and emotions. Through this collection, he views the same situations with the two different lenses- first of innocence and the other of experience. However, not only does his poetry reveals the injustices prevalent in the society but maintains the ray of optimism to change the condition. His poetry reveals the horror behind colonialism & racism, criticizes child labour and hypocrisy of the religious institutions.

W.B. Yeats, a poet who harshly condemns all sorts of protests that turn into bloodshed, take toll on many lives. He doesn’t even hesitate to criticize the love of his life Maud Gonne for leading such protests. He does it all in a very subtle yet direct manner. His poetry like The Second Coming, informs us of the horror and abnormality that comes up with the wars and hatred and describes it all as anticipating the end of the whole world.

If the aim of a language is to communicate, then only a simple language can justify this aim. The aim of the “unacknowledged legislators of the world” is not to point out at the oddity of our lives but to force the readers to look for a solution to remove this oddity. And they succeed in doing this only through their power of words. With this power of articulating one’s views appropriately in their inspirational poems, the poets are capable of bringing about a positive change not just in the society but also in the thought of a common man.