At the chalkface: Shelley

“Cold advisers of yet colder kings; Who scheme, regardless of the poor man’s pang? Who coolly sharpen misery’s sharpest fang; Yourselves secure.”

Blimey, that’s telling them. That’s telling truth to power. Incendiary stuff. Topical too. Who could those “cold advisors” be? Our tax credit cutters? Ofsted’s cold minions? Or the pale chancellor himself?

Okay, there are some dodgy rhymes, but these surely have real bite. Do you know the scribe? Go on, guess. Woody Guthrie? Early Bob Dylan? Billy Bragg?

Nope. Shelley. Percy Bysshe Shelley from his A Poetical Essay on The Existing State of Things, written when he was 18. A fierce denunciation of the “rank corruption” of the English ruling classes, their wars, oppression, colonialism, torture, their lying press and institutions. A “lost” poem, hitherto privately owned and hidden from the public, it was finally published last week, after 200 years, in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Why the wait? A bit too subversive? It may well have caused Shelley’s expulsion from the university. Mind you, his treatise on The Necessity of Atheism didn’t go down too well with the authorities. Shelley was rusticated. He was a firebrand, a teenage protest singer.