Art & Creativity Quote by Edmund Burke

For a statesman best known for distrusting political fantasies, Burke’s line is a sly concession: the thing he fears is also the thing he can’t deny is powerful. “Substantiating shadows” is not a compliment wrapped in lace; it’s an admission that poetry specializes in making the unreal feel documentable. It gives weight, texture, and emotional consequence to what can’t be weighed, textured, or proved. That’s precisely why it’s intoxicating, and why it’s dangerous in the wrong hands.

Burke is writing from an era when rhetoric didn’t just decorate power, it manufactured consent for it. In the late 18th century, the Enlightenment’s promise of reason was colliding with revolutionary mythmaking and nationalist sentiment. Burke’s own career, especially his recoil from the French Revolution, is a long argument against abstract ideals treated as if they were flesh-and-blood realities. Read that way, “lending existence to nothing” isn’t nihilism; it’s a warning label. Poetry can conjure a “people,” a “destiny,” a “natural order,” and once the audience feels it, the conjuring starts to govern.

The brilliance is the double-edge. Burke can’t dismiss poetry as mere ornament because he knows politics runs on the same fuel: symbols, stories, and the choreography of feeling. The subtext is almost confessionary: our public life depends on fictions we agree to inhabit. Poetry just does it with more honesty about the trick.