What is the poet’s role in history? For a historian of Britain like myself, this question calls to mind the work of EP Thompson, who read t...

What is the poet’s role in history? For a historian of Britain like myself, this question calls to mind the work of EP Thompson, who read the history of the English working class with one eye on the Romantic poets who sensitively captured the social and cultural transformations of the revolutionary late 18th century.
Their notions of place, people and conflict were also shaped by the imperial expansion unfolding in precisely the same moment, and they waxed orientalists even in their defences of freedom. Thompson’s favourite among the Romantics was the prophetic William Blake, partly for his consistent anti-imperialism. He disapproved of William Wordsworth’s eventual disenchantment with the revolutionary spirit.
As an activist and aspiring poet himself, Thompson saw poetry and politics as related pursuits. For him, poetry stood for “deeply inspired action…The poet was crucial to revolutionary politics, for he could articulate the longings that, along with practical programs, inspired men to act”. Blake “embodied the possibility of poetry and politics, romantic yearning and rational resistance in a single movement”.
This understanding shaped Thompson’s sense of purpose as a historian as he set out to recover the creative – poetic – radical capacity of 18th-century English workers. His faith in creativity also...