“Poetry and the Constitution” panel, 8 Dec.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, 8 December, the National Constitution Center will host an online panel discussion about “Poetry and the Constitution.”

That may seem like an incongruous pairing of topics. As New York governor Mario often remarked, “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” But here’s the event description:

How have poets and poetry—from John Milton to Mercy Otis Warren and Phillis Wheatley—influenced the Constitution and America’s core democratic principles?

Join Vincent Carretta, editor of the Penguin Classics editions of the Complete Writings of Phillis Wheatley and professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland; Eileen M. Hunt, professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame; and Eric Slauter, associate professor and director of the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Chicago, for a discussion exploring the ways poetry has intersected with the Constitution and constitutional ideas throughout American history.

Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates.

Prof. Hunt tweeted that she plans to “talk about Mercy Otis Warren’s all-too-prescient critique of the potential tyranny of the Supreme Court in her 1788 ‘Observations on the New Constitution’.” That pamphlet was, of course, not poetry, but Warren did write verse on political topics, such as the 1778 ode I discussed back here.

Prof. Slauter is the author of The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution. It includes a detailed discussion of how American Revolutionaries responded to Alexander Pope’s 1733 couplet “For Forms of Government let Fools contest; / Whate’er is best administer’d is best.”

This discussion will start at noon and last for an hour. It is free for people registering here.