Twitter rips into Jeremy Corbyn's 'pretentious' poetry – except it's actually by Shelley

“Rise like Lions after slumberIn unvanquishable number-Shake your chains to earth like dewWhich in sleep had fallen on youYe are many – they are few.”It’s not the first time Jeremy Corbyn has quoted verse XXXVIII of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy. He recited it on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury in 2017 in those innocent days when singing “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” to the tune of the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army was popular and Boris Johnson had never presented his prime ministerial credentials to the Queen. Yesterday Corbyn posted that same verse on Twitter, using it to plug his and Len McCluskey’s looming anthology, Poetry for the Many, which can be preordered online by right-thinking lefties, though ideally, you’d think, not from Amazon.Twitter was not impressed with the poem which, alarmingly, many took to be the work of the former Labour leader and still MP for Islington North. “Good heavens this is baaaaad,” tweeted uthekwane. “The whole poem is utterly dreadful and the scansion is totally broken but that use of ‘ye’ is the most pretentious shit imaginable,” tweeted Danielle Blake. “Vogons wept,” she added in another tweet. Vogons, you recall, are slug-like humanoids from Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s
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