The Andrea Mitchell Center is pleased to announce a new initiative, “Poetry and Politics,” in which the Center will pursue the interrelation between poetry broadly defined (poetry proper, literature, and imaginative works of philosophy) and democratic politics. The  aspiration is to probe the intersections between aesthetics and politics, hopeful that poetic analysis and political analysis might be mutually enriching. The Mitchell Center is pleased to welcome Owen Boynton, a literary scholar and teacher, to spearhead the program by interpreting poetic works in posts that will be shared periodically with the Mitchell Center community.   

• [NEW] Percy Shelley's "England in 1819"
  
  Percy Shelley is among the most politically invested poets to write in English. Reading his “England in 1819,” this post finds in the poem’s wording both a yearning for political change and an understanding of what sort of change it might be possible for a poem (or at least this poem) to bring about. 
  
  
• Thomas Hardy's "The Voice"
  
  For his first post, Boynton examines Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Voice” and, along the way, further elaborates the ambition of the Mitchell Center’s new “Poetry and Politics” initiative.