The Politics of the Poetic: Resistance and Renewal in Transatlantic Literature

Abstract

This paper investigates how poetry across the transatlantic literary sphere—from the Romantic movements of Europe to the modern and postcolonial expressions of America and Ireland—has served as a vital medium of political resistance and cultural renewal. Through close examination of poets such as W.B. Yeats, Langston Hughes, T.S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, and Sylvia Plath, it explores how language, form, and imagination intertwine to reimagine the relationship between art and politics. The study argues that poetry does not retreat from history but engages it—transforming collective trauma and social struggle into acts of moral and aesthetic reconstruction. It considers how Irish poetry reclaims cultural voice through myth and memory, how American poetry transforms racial and democratic experience into song, and how European modernism confronts spiritual crisis through formal innovation. Ultimately, the paper contends that the “politics of the poetic” lies as much in renewal as in rebellion: the enduring power of verse to convert historical dissonance into creative harmony and to envision freedom through artistic form.