[2][3] However the concept had a long prehistory in Western culture, with classical figures like Orpheus or Solon being appealed to as precedents for the poet's civilising role.
[5] Plato only allowed the already censured poet to guide the young, to be an acknowledged legislator at the price of total external control.
[6] Less threatened by the poetic role, the Romans by contrast saw poetry, with Horace, as primarily pleasing, and only secondarily as instructive.
[13] Shelley maintained that, through their powers of imaginative understanding, 'Poets' (in the widest sense, of ancient Greece) were able to identify and formulate emerging socio-cultural trends; and were as a result "the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration...the unacknowledged legislators of the world".
[14] The grand claims of the Romantics began to give way in the twentieth century to a more ironic stance[15] – Yeats speaking for his calling in general when he wrote "We have no gift to set a statesman right".