Poetry, politics and happiness

'Poetry has a political past. It is not just that the most subversive voices going back to the Roman poet Ovid, have been writers of verse. It is that, as Confucius said, the most important act of a ruler is clarifying words. 
     Confucious, like Aristotle, wanted to put his ideas for a better society into action by advising a king. He never got to do it, but when asked what his first decree would be should he ever gain influence, he declared: "Get the language right." Unless we know what we mean, we have no chance of forging happiness, he explained.

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... the founder of modern China, Mao Zedong ... best known for declaring that "power comes out of the barrel of a gun". But he was also a poet and launched the Cultural Revolution which killed 20 million people, because he was attacked with words, not bullets. When a playwright parodied him in the 1960s, Mao knew the game was up, and so unleashed his murderous Red Guards. This is a long way from Aristotle, who believed that politics was not just an ethical business, but the highest form of philosophy.'

Peter Ellingsen, The Age, Melbourne.