The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

by Carl R. Trueman

It is in poetry, both in the theoretical reflection on its tasks and in its actual practice, that we find a number of key ideas emerging that prove of immense importance in the long story of the rise of sexual identity politics. First, there is the notion of poetry putting the listeners or readers in touch with an authentic reality that strips away the constructed corruptions of society and connects them to some more universal and authentic nature. Second, there is the related issue of the importance ascribed to aesthetics, or the idea that poetry (and therefore the poet) fulfills a profoundly ethical task in ennobling humanity by cultivating the correct sentiments through the medium of art. Third, there is the connection that emerges from this thinking, of seeing poetry as a political, even revolutionary, exercise and poets as, in Shelley’s phrase, “the unacknowledged legislators of the World.”3 And finally, there are the specific connections we see emerging in the poetry and prose of men such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Blake between attacks on organized Christianity, notions of political liberation, and the idea of sexual freedom. With radical poets such as Shelley and Blake, we begin to see the emergence of the important emphasis on sex as the central element of individual authenticity.