Creative writing is a huge umbrella term for all sorts of writing – including novels and poetry. Fiction writing is not necessarily political, and creative writers can choose their subject matter from the wide gamut of human lived experiences. However, there are novelists and poets who cross the boundary into the political, and their aesthetic sense influences, and is in turn influenced by, politics.

There is no shortage of materials covering the endlessly fascinating topic of writers, novelists and poets who have gone political.

We all know that Ezra Pound, arguably the most famous poet to emerge from the United States, was an out-and-out fascist. But how many of us know about the flamboyant, extravagant and determined proto-fascist Gabriele D’Annunzio? The latter, known as the Bard (Il Vate) in Italy, D’Annunzio achieved fame as a poet, writer, soldier and a practitioner of aesthetic showmanship in politics.

Born to a wealthy family in 1863, D’Annunzio displayed a flair for poetry at an early age. He also developed an overinflated ego, with a penchant for theatrics. He lived, according to the motto of one of his characters in The Child of Pleasure, life as a work of art. Combining poetry with a decadent lifestyle – he was a lecherous, womanising profligate – he developed a national following in his home country prior to WW1.

He built and cemented his reputation as a novelist with his pre-WW1 literary output. From 1889 to 1910, D’Annunzio produced a succession of novels, elaborating his interpretation of the Nietzschean Ubermensch, the superman. Let’s clarify one misconception here; the Nietzsche’s concept of the superman has been misappropriated by far right and ultranationalist political forces, mainly the Nazi party, to buttress their malignant view of a white Aryan superior race. That is bunk, along with the far right, drunk on bad misunderstandings of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s concept of the superman was not racial, but aesthetic and moral. Repudiating Christian morality as that of the slave, he was searching for a process of ethical self-discovery. The Ubermensch was not part of a collective; Nietzsche despised socialism and all notions of equality. He equally despised nationalism and antisemitism. D’Annunzio, a political figure, adopted the concept of a superman to mean a political strongman, directing the strength of the mass of people.

D’Annunzio was a proponent of Italian irredentism; the reclamation of lost Italian lands to create one unified Italy. The Austro-Hungarian empire, a protagonist in WW1, controlled territories in the northern Balkans populated by Italians. D’Annunzio, a combat veteran of WW1, got his chance to put his philosophy into action.

In the aftermath of WW1 and the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian empire, its territories were up for grabs. Believing that they had been cheated out of their ‘rightful’ claims for territory, D’Annunzio and his arditi – war veterans – marched in their thousands to the coastal town of Fiume (today Rijeka, Croatia) and declared a republic. It was to last 15 months.

This experiment of D’Annunzio’s prefigured Mussolini’s Italy in many ways. Setting up a corporatist, anarcho-syndicalist type structure, Fiume’s working class residents were organised into nine vertical ‘syndicates’, or corporations at the service of the state. Giving speeches from the balcony of his palatial residence, D’Annunzio incorporated the Roman salute – the outstretched right arm – in his theatrical displays.

The Fiume republic soon fell into decrepitude; attracting occultists, futurists, drug traffickers (cocaine became a major commodity) and practitioners of non-traditional sexual enthusiasm. Drug addiction was a major problem, superseded only by the rampant spread of sexually transmitted diseases. D’Annunzio was the supreme commander in chief of this mutilated schmozzle.

The sizeable Croatian population of Fiume was encouraged to leave – sometimes forcibly. The Italian government in Rome, finally running out of patience with D’Annunzio’s extravagance, the Italian army marched into Fiume and shut down the entire social experiment in 1920.

All the daily poetry readings encouraged by D’Annunzio, the mandated Italianised cheers copying the war cry from Homer’s Illiad, made for a remarkable spectacle, but was no substitute for practical administration.

D’Annunzio died in 1938, but the ideas he germinated, particularly the corporatist model, lived on in Mussolini’s Italy.

To be sure, D’Annunzio was not the only European bard attracted to the ideas of fascism. Ireland’s most famous poet, William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) was writing his poems while the Fiume experiment was still in full swing. Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming, has been quoted as nauseam by centrist political commentators as an expression of exasperation with the terrible after effects of revolution and civil war.

With its melancholic observations of how ‘things fall apart’ and the ‘centre cannot hold’, Yeats’ The Second Coming has acquired new resonance in the aftermath of Brexit and MAGA politics in America. But this deployment of his poetry overlooks an important component of Yeats’ outlook; he was a fascist sympathiser.

His conservative perspective led him, in the interwar years, to uphold the Irish Blueshirts as a political alternative to what he perceived was the chaos and crass consumerism of liberal capitalism. The Blueshirts, modeled on their German Brownshirt counterparts, were fanatically anticommunist, clashed with the IRA and the political Left, and advocated a corporatist style state along the lines of Mussolini’s Italy.

Yeats, in the 1920 and 30s, sympathised with the ostensible order and stability that the Blueshirts represented in contrast to the decadent liberal capitalist orthodoxy. Rather than a champion of democratic liberalism, Yeats supported the vision of the Irish Blueshirts. Although later distancing himself from the authoritarian tendencies of fascism, Yeats became, like his idol the Anglo-Irish Edmund Burke, a champion of conservative traditional hierarchies and order.

I am definitely not suggesting that writers be canceled or their works destroyed because of their political beliefs. I am suggesting that we need to be mindful of the political context from which writers and novelists emerge, if only to better understand the messages they are trying to convey.