Poetry or politics?

On BreakPoint recently, Eric Metaxas remembered the 185^th anniversary of slavery’s abolition in Great Britain by highlighting William Wilberforce.

But Wilberforce wasn’t alone. While he labored in Parliament, his friend and contemporary Hannah More fought slavery with her pen. As Karen Swallow Prior relates in her excellent biography “Fierce Convictions,” More was a celebrated author of her time, one of many writers who contributed poems and essays to anti-slavery pamphlets.

As Prior explains, More knew that the best way to teach truth was to capture imaginations. That’s why she used poetry to bring the evils of slavery to life, sometimes telling stories from the little-heard perspectives of slaves themselves.

Politics is most often downstream of culture. Hannah More and Wilberforce recognized that changing the laws of a nation starts with changing hearts.

To find Hannah More’s biography “Fierce Convictions,” come to BreakPoint.org.

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