I think that poets can say, "What we want is for everybody on earth to wake up free from fear and with access to medicine and clean water and education." But I don't think poets have any special insight on how to get there. And the 20th century is a pretty good record of that because so many of the great poets were Stalinists: Vallejo, Neruda, Eluard, Aragon, etc. They wrote their odes to Lenin and Stalin. They glorified some of the most violent and grotesque dictatorships of the 20th century. And a lot of the ones who were not Stalinists were fascists or fascist sympathizers.
![I think that poets can say, What we want is for everybody on earth to wake up free from fear and with access to medicine and clean water and education. But I don't think poets have any special insight on how to get](http://cdn.quoteddaily.com/images/robert-hass/i-think-that-poets-can-say-what-we-want-is-for-everybody-on-earth-to-wake-up-free-from-fear.jpg)