Mao’s work is proof that artistic refinement is no guarantee of a gentler politics. In 1966, Red Guards supplemented their Little Red Book with a collection of 25 poems attributed to Mao, which led to an enthusiasm for old style verses among those dedicated to destroying “feudal relics”. The last line that Mao ever wrote, a year before launching the Cultural Revolution, was a premonition of the coming tumult: “Look, the world is being turned upside down”.

‘Censor and creator’

Poetry has been entered as incriminating evidence at the International Criminal Court, where Radovan Karadžić, the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, was found guilty of genocide. A 1992 BBC documentary captured a meeting between Karadžić and the nationalist Russian poet Eduard Limonov, in which Karadžić recites a poem that prophesies violence and Limonov fires a volley of bullets into the valley below. Karadžić claims to have anticipated the battle years beforehand, and his 1971 poem Sarajevo contains the lines:

The town burns like a piece of incense

In the smoke rumbles our consciousness…

I know that all of these are the preparations of the scream:

What does the black metal in the garage have for us?

Establishing intention on the part of a perpetrator is a requirement under international law. Karadžić was a key figure in what Slavoj Žižek terms the ‘poetic-military complex’, which venerated the literary canon of nationalism, particularly Petar Petrović-Njegoš’ epic poem The Mountain Wreath (1847), in which the shedding of Muslim blood is presented as an act of baptism for the Serb nation.

The rhetoric of genocide is cloaked in anodyne metaphor: a nation ‘purified’ through ‘ethnic cleansing’. Yet readers must also be aware of the perils of treating an artistic persona as the author’s own. Consider the work of Ayatollah Khomeini, whose Persian poetry channels the spirit of Sufi seers Rumi and Hafez:

I am a supplicant for a goblet of wine

from the hand of a sweetheart.

In whom can I confide this secret of mine?

Where can I take this sorrow?

These lyrics are difficult to reconcile with Khomeini’s public persona:

I have become imprisoned, O beloved, by the mole on your lip!

I saw your ailing eyes and became ill through love…

Open the door of the tavern and let us go there day and night,

For I am sick and tired of the mosque and seminary.



The ayatollah’s devotees are keen to read these verses strictly allegorically (‘The mosque and the preacher are the empty display of outward religiosity’) – although some lines are difficult to neuter: “I have torn off the garb of asceticism and hypocrisy”. The poems reveal the ayatollah as a mystic, albeit one who can issue a fatwa, making him both censor and creator.