The Leader as Poet

The pre-eminent Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges, considered Dante’s Divine Comedy as “the best book literature has achieved”.  Obviously inspired by Dante’s Catholic faith, the erudite epic has nonetheless influenced poets, novelists, and philosophers of all faiths over many centuries, and continues to command the admiration of people all around the world, even in this anti-intellectual age.  Dante’s insights into the human condition are timeless, swelling the waters of wisdom to wash over the arid wastes of cynicism and despair that blight our world.

But now there is still more to be explained:
Those who pursue the good, but strive with less
Than their full measure to attain it. All
Although confused, find good to apprehend
In which the mind can rest. This they may call
An object of desire, a fruitful end
They try to reach, but should they try and fail
Sufficiently to see, or gain, the goal,
This terrace here, and all it must entail
Of penitence, awaits each slothful soul
With torments for its fault. And then beyond
This terrace rise a further three, to hold
Those who were far from feeble but too fond
Of all the pinchbeck that they thought was gold,
The pleasures of the world, which give no joy,
Which don’t ring true, but click like counterfeit –
The earthbound goods fit only to destroy
Good’s essence, and to draw love by deceit.

—Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Purgatory, Canto XVII (tr. Clive James)

Mining the bountiful reef of golden insight extended through the works of Shakespeare uncovers a psychological mother lode indispensible to those who would lead.  Consider a likable but lax leader, whose followers have become outrageously promiscuous, leaving them in the charge of a puritanical deputy, while he observes developments from the vantage point of disguise.

One of the victims of the deputy’s clampdown is a young man whose fiancé is pregnant.  When he is sentenced to death, he appeals to his sister, a nun, to make an appeal to the deputy.  But the nun becomes an object of the deputy’s own lust, and he offers to spare her brother only on condition that she sleep with him.  The chaste woman is aghast.

To whom should I complain? Did I tell this,
Who would believe me? O perilous mouths,
That bear in them one and the self-same tongue,
Either of condemnation or approof;
Bidding the law make court’sy to their will:
Hooking both right and wrong to the appetite,
To follow as it draws! I’ll to my brother:
Though he hath fallen by prompture of the blood,
Yet hath he in him such a mind of honour.
That, had he twenty heads to tender down
On twenty bloody blocks, he’d yield them up,
Before his sister should her body stoop
To such abhorr’d pollution.
Then, Isabel, live chaste, and, brother, die:
More than our brother is our chastity.
I’ll tell him yet of Angelo’s request,
And fit his mind to death, for his soul’s rest.

—Isabella in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Act II, Scene IV

The climax of Measure for Measure has the deputy on trial for rape and murder, with his only hope being an unlikely act of forgiveness on the part of the morally severe sister.  If each of us is measured according to the measure by which we have judged others, who will be left standing unsullied?  Christ, Lincoln, Gandhi, John Paul II, and Mandela are the indelible historical examples of forgiveness as leadership.

The Faustian Bargain, the theme of a medieval folk tale repeated in many versions, lies at the heart of Modernity’s woes and the global leadership crisis.  Goethe’s Faust tells the story of a man who, in his reckless quest for self-gratification, makes a pact with the devil, Mephistopheles, offering his soul in exchange for power and unbridled pleasure in this life. It inevitably ends in tragedy.

I’ve studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,
And even, alas! Theology
All through and through with ardour keen!
Here now I stand, poor fool, and see
I’m just as wise as formerly.
Am called a Master, even Doctor too,
And now I’ve nearly ten years through
Pulled my students by their noses to and fro
And up and down, across, about,
And see there’s nothing we can know!
That all but burns my heart right out.
True, I am more clever than all the vain creatures,
The Doctors and Masters, Writers and Preachers;
No doubts plague me, nor scruples as well.
I’m not afraid of devil or hell.

—From Faust by Goethe

Goethe was one of the founders of Romanticism, and in the poetry of the English Romantics, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, is to be found verse of intriguing power and profundity.  Partly in response to the cold, calculating, truncated rationalism of the Enlightenment, they were driven by the values of freedom, power, and imagination, leaving posterity with much to ponder.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

—Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Shelley had Ozymandias published in 1818, and when one considers the follies of the two centuries that followed, it is difficult not to feel dismay, and indeed anger, that hubris is still the defining characteristic in politics and business.

Among the great observers of that primal flaw in the human condition, T S Eliot, a giant of 20^th century literature, remains as a beacon of hope in our postmodern existential crisis. He delineates the fault-line of the human condition, reminding us that all our answers to all our questions are ultimately shaped by our understanding of what it means to be human. When we get that wrong, we get everything wrong, and it is not difficult to see why solutions to the leadership deficit in every area of postmodern society persistently elude us.

O weariness of men who turn from God
To the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action,
To arts and inventions and daring enterprises,
To schemes of human greatness thoroughly discredited,
Binding the earth and the water to your service,
Exploiting the seas and developing the mountains,
Dividing the stars into common and preferred,
Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator,
Engaged in working out a rational morality,
Engaged in printing as many books as possible
Plotting of happiness and flinging empty bottles,
Turning from your vacancy to fevered enthusiasm
For nation or race or what you call humanity;
Though you forget the way to the temple,
There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the stranger.

—T S Eliot in Choruses from ‘The Rock’, Part III

Among the perceptive and eloquent voices who fell victim to the brute mechanism of ideological insanity, Anna Akhmatova, possibly the greatest Russian poet of the 20^th century, is well worthy of the final word.

And if ever in this country
They decide to erect a monument to me,
I consent to that honour
Under these conditions—that it stand
Neither by the sea, where I was born:
My last tie with the sea is broken,
Nor in the tsar’s garden near the cherished pine stump,
Where an inconsolable shade looks for me,
But here, where I stood for three hundred hours,
And where they never unbolted the doors for me.

—Anna Akhmatova in the Epilogue to Requiem

Leadership is indeed poetry.