The Unacknowledged Legislators of the World

I suffer from a very old-fashioned sense of poetry as successful divination. Good poetry makes objective and visible ideas that are haven't yet found expression, and since my old friend Shelley put this far better than I could in his Defence of Poetry I won't develop this thought any further. Sean O'Brien expresses the problems we confront when the transcendental horizon of judgement, often expressed through religious language, becomes totally disassociated from the local strategies we use to solve specific, local problems, in his poem "The Citizens". The idea of a negative dialectic of enlightenment is not new. Also this is not a perfect poem by any means. The echo of the Holocaust in the last two lines unbalances the central idea comprised in "all we want...". Something with more bathos is needed to follow the tragedy of small dreams. It is inaccurate, and a bit lazy, to use the Holocaust as a metaphor for anything else. For all that the first six lines unlock how humble, limited modern citizens who make no claim beyond their own interests, can still be monsters.

What language? You had no language.
Stirring bone soup with a bone, we sip
From the cup of the skull. This is culture.
All we want to do is live forever,
To which end we make you bow down to our gods
In the midday square's Apollonian light
Before we ship you to the furnaces
And sow you in the fields like salt

Another line from the collection, November, "Work is good, like love and company". Wish I'd said that.