Politics are not alien to poetry and in his Wiles Lectures Sir Maurice Bowra covered the main lines of European poetry during the first sixty years of the twentieth century in so far as it directly related to politics. From an exceptionally wide reading of the poetry of Western Europe, Greece, Russia and China, Sir Maurice gained unrivalled equipment for illuminating the three poetical forms with a political influence: the prophetic; the intimate and personal; and the politically effective – or ineffective. He illustrates the impact which world events had on the vision and technique of the poets of 1900–60; of Mandel'shtam, Akhmatova, Mayakovsky, Blok and Pasternak in Tsarist and Soviet Russia; of Stefan George and others in Germany; of Cernuda and Jimenez in the Spanish Civil War; of Mao Tse-tung as poet; of Yeats as political prophet; of Edith Sitwell under the impact of Hiroshima; and of many more.
