One does not often see the nouns poetry and politics linked together in the same sentence, even though the words are mere pages apart in most dictionaries of the English language; hence, the following from Joseph J. Ellis’s National Book Award winner, American Sphinx, The Character of Thomas Jefferson:
“The most famous section of the Declaration, which has become the most quoted statement of human rights in recorded history as well as the most eloquent justification of revolution on behalf of them, went through the Continental Congress without comment and with only one very minor change. These are, in all probability, the best known fifty-eight words in American history: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain [inherent and] inalienable Rights; that among these are life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This is the seminal statement of the American Creed, the closest approximation to political poetry ever produced in American culture.”
And before anyone ventures forth to advise that Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address approximated poetry and politics, bear in mind that he bowed down to Jefferson in his remarks: “All honor to Jefferson — to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecaste, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, and so to embalm it there, that today and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.”
