What is the public value of poetry? How do poets envisage their own role and function within society? How do we? Do poets seek to shape public opinion and behavior? Should they? Or do they offer alternatives--perhaps sacred alternatives--to political and religious ideologies? Are they what Shelley in 1821 called 'the unacknowledged legislators of the World'? And what might that mean?

During the decades immediately preceding the Revolution of 1789 the status of contemporary poetry in France was at its lowest ebb. At the same time the perceived power of the writer to influence public events...