Interestingly, our celebration of poetry this month was, in part, inspired by William Blackstone’s skepticism. Blackstone (1723-1780) was skeptical that poetry, in all its splendor, could ever be integrated into the life of a lawyer. He initially took the view that the law is fundamentally incompatible with poetry. Blackstone, an 18th century legal scholar, began his study of law in 1741, but for the previous three years he devoted himself to reading and writing poetry at Oxford. His poem “The Lawyer’s Farewell to His Muse” (1744) represents a stoic resolve to turn away from the imaginative wonder of poetry and toward the more steadfast work of reason. What results, is this poem of rupture, if you will. It breaks the world into two parts; the hemisphere of reason and the hemisphere of imagination. For Blackstone, a neophyte lawyer by 1744, reason had become imagination’s adversary.
Our display invites you to join those who resits Blackstone's dichotomous turn. In the spirit of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822), we invite you to join the likes of Professor Kristen David Adams, Professor Susan Ayres, and MacArthur Foundation Fellow Reginald Dwayne Betts who, like Shelley, are mighty defenders of poetry’s ability to synthesize a world of beauty, imagination, and wonder with the steely work of reason. The exhibit features poems by lawyers and judges that embrace reason’s hard truths while simultaneously revealing something human, moral, wondrous, and imaginative in their lines.
Visit the library this April to see more examples of poetry in action within the world of legal professionals, including examples of Reginald Dwayne Betts’s redaction poetry.
April is National Poetry Month. We hope you can make time for a quick poem now and then because lawyers should not be forced to live by prose alone.
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