La poésie et le changement social

Dans son livre Illusion and Reality, Christopher Caudwell analyse la nature et la fonction sociale de la poésie. Il met l'accent sur la fonction de la poésie dans le changement social. Dans le passage qui suit, il s'appuie sur l'exemple des chants des travailleurs lors des récoltes dans les sociétés précapitalistes, afin d'illustrer comment la poésie permet de travailler les émotions et ainsi de transformer les individus pour qu'ils puissent innover et changer leurs circonstances.

"The tool adapts the hand to a new function, without changing the inherited shape of the hands of humanity. The poem adapts the heart to a new purpose, without changing the eternal desires of men's hearts. It does so by projecting man into a world of phantasy which is superior to his present reality precisely because it is a world of superior reality - a world of more important reality not yet realised, whose realisation demands the very poetry which phantastically anticipates it. (...) But only by means of this illusion can be brought into being a reality which would not otherwise exist. Without the ceremony phantastically portraying the granaries bursting with grain, the pleasures and delights of the harvest, men would not face the hard labour necessary to bring it into being. Sweetened with a harvest song, the work goes well. Just because poetry is what it is, it exhibits a reality beyond the reality it brings to birth and nominally portrays, a reality which though secondary is yet higher and more complex. For poetry describes and expresses not so much the grain in its concreteness, the harvest in its factual essence - which it helps to realise and which are the conditions for its own existence - but the emotional, social and collective complex which is that tribe's relation to the harvest. It expresses a whole new world of truth - its emotion, its comradeship, its sweat, its long-drawn-out wait and happy consummation - which has been brought into being by the fact that man's relation to the harvest is not instinctive and blind but economic and conscious. Not poetry's abstract statement - its content of facts - but its dynamic role in society - its content of collective emotion - is therefore poetry's truth."