During a 1976 interview, author and poet James Dickey said this about poets and celebrities pronouncing on politics:

INTERVIEWER

Some of your detractors have mentioned the fact that they felt that you should use your influence, your place in the world, for the “betterment of man.”

DICKEY

If I knew what it was, I might do that. But I don’t know. There’s this tendency in American life to assume that because someone is good or maybe just notorious or publicized in one realm that he’s a universal authority on everything. So, Frank Sinatra or John Wayne can tell you how to vote. What competence do they have in politics? Or that a poet can tell you about ecology or something of that sort. A poet is only a professional sensibility. His opinion in politics is no better than anyone else’s ninety-nine percent of the time. But they’re always being interviewed and always being asked their political opinion: what should we do with the military, what should we do with the economy, with government spending, et cetera. Poets don’t know anything about that. If they did, they wouldn’t be poets. This is not to say that they are precluded from knowing anything about it at all; it is to say, however, that just because they are poets their opinions should not be paid any more attention to than anybody else’s. It does not give them any privilege or any insight or any clairvoyance as to the political and economic and military future of America.

INTERVIEWER

You don’t feel, then, that since a poet has a highly developed sensitivity about our universe and about our place in the world and our society, he should make public pronouncements about the direction our society is taking?

DICKEY

I think in that way lies madness. No; all he’s got is his own sensibility and his own opinions as a private citizen. But he has no privilege. Insight, yes. Maybe a poet could come along who could solve all our problems, but I haven’t seen him yet. The history of poets pronouncing on public issues is notoriously dismal.

It was the poet Shelley who famously called poets the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” These days any comparison to “legislators” might be considered an insult, but Shelley certainly didn’t mean it that way:

For Shelley, “poets … are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society…” Social and linguistic order are not the sole products of the rational faculty, as language is “arbitrarily produced by the imagination” and reveals “the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension” of a higher beauty and truth. Shelley’s conclusive remark that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” suggests his awareness of “the profound ambiguity inherent in linguistic means, which he considers at once as an instrument of intellectual freedom and a vehicle for political and social subjugation”

Shelley not only seemed to think poets have enormous influence in the world (poets were far more famous, and poetry generally more highly regarded, in his day than it is now). He also was himself a very politically active guy. And it should come as no surprise which political side he was on:

[Shelley’s father insisted] that [Shelley] renounce…his beliefs, which included atheism, vegetarianism, free love, and political radicalism; Shelley refused. The resulting estrangement from his father was completed when Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook, the 16-year-old daughter of a coffee-house keeper. Shelley now sought a vocation: he went to Ireland for a few months to campaign for political reform; his poem “Queen Mab” appeared in 1813. The following year he met his hero William Godwin, the author of Political Justice, and fell in love with his daughter Mary, a radical and an idealist like himself. The daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary later wrote Frankenstein and The Last Man, two novels that remain popular and influential today. Taking along Mary’s step-sister Jane Clairmont (daughter of the second Mrs. Godwin), Mary and Percy eloped to Switzerland in July 1814.

Like quite a few leftist radicals, Shelley didn’t have to soil his hands like the common man. He had an inheritance:

An inheritance from his grandfather of £1000 per annum in 1815 alleviated Shelley’s financial difficulties, which were often caused by his generosity to others.

Shelley resembled certain other leftist radicals in the complexity of his domestic life, in which he threw off the yoke of tradition and lived pretty much the way he wished. His behavior may seem familiar today, but imagine how shocking it was in the early part of the nineteenth century:

…[Shelley’s] domestic situation became very complex: Harriet, who had already given him a daughter, Ianthe, bore a son, Charles, on Nov. 30, 1814, after Shelley had been living with Mary for several months. A few months later (Feb. 22, 1815) Mary bore a daughter, who lived only a few days, and in January 1816 their son William was born. In 1816, Percy, Mary, and Jane Clairmont (who had reinvented herself as Claire and become Lord Byron’s mistress) returned to Geneva, where they met Byron and his friend (and doctor) John Polidori…After they returned to England, Mary’s half-sister Fanny Imlay committed suicide in October, and less than a month later, Harriet (apparently pregnant by another man) drowned herself. Shelley married Mary in December but lost custody of his children by Harriet to her family.

During his life, Shelley was by no means as popular as his buddy Byron, who was a rock star. But despite this, a number of scholars believe that Shelley’s political views were very, very influential indeed:

Paul Foot, in his Red Shelley, has documented the pivotal role Shelley’s works ”“ especially Queen Mab ”” have played in the genesis of British radicalism. Although Shelley’s works were banned from respectable Victorian households, his political writings were pirated by men such as Richard Carlile who regularly went to jail for printing “seditious and blasphemous libel” (i.e. material proscribed by the government), and these cheap pirate editions reached hundreds of activists and workers throughout the nineteenth century.

In other countries such as India, Shelley’s works both in the original and in translation have influenced poets such as Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda Das. A pirated copy of Prometheus Unbound dated 1835 is said to have been seized in that year by customs at Bombay.

So it’s possible that Shelley wasn’t just a megalomaniac, and that he did influence the course of political history. These days, poets seem to influence comparatively little—except for who will get published in poetry journals read moslty by their fellow poets in academia and aspirants to the club. Now it’s rock stars and movie stars who serve the function of shaping politics through the widespread influence of their point of view, which is almost always to the left.

I’m with Dickey on this.