The Man Who Was Thursday

Speaking of poets and politics, I've just been reading G K Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, at the insistence of my sister (and yes, she's right: it does make a bizarre type of sense of the post-9/11 world). It opens with a debate between two poets about whether poetry owes alliegance to order or anarchy. One argues that:

An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway...The poet is always in revolt.

The other counters:

Take your books of mere poetry and prose, let me read a timetable with tears of pride...What is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt...The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.

There's something, to my mind, in both of these points of view, though they point to very different poetic traditions.