«Witness is What You Must Bear»: Margaret Atwood’s Poetic Politics

The relationship between literature and politics is a central preoccupation for the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, which is not restricted to her literary works, but is, rather, completed and reaffirmed by her belonging to organizations such as Amnesty International. Approaching Atwood as a writer who is engaged with the defence of human rights, this essay explores her collections of poetry published in the Seventies and Eighties. The analysis of these collections proves that, although critics have usuallyignored the democratic-socialist content of Atwood’s writing, politics is an essential issue to understanding her works.