In the One State, poetry is harnessed for social ends. As D-503 highlights, poetry is used to help children internalize and affirm state rules and institutions. This is done through, for example, poems celebrating the Guardians as “thorns about a rose” (25) and memorizing works such as “Those Who Come Late to Work” (25), and “Stanzas on Sex-Hygiene” (25). Meanwhile, beyond childhood, words and poetry are used to justify and celebrate state executions and elections. On both occasions, state poets like R-13 deliver works on the Benefactor’s greatness or the “insane deeds” (17) of the condemned. These acts within the novel are mirrors of the ways creative arts evolved to serve the state following the Russian Civil War.

The One State’s social use of poetry contrasts with the established Western view of artistic forms, in which poetry in particular is often aligned with expressing deep and authentic emotion. When D-503 reads a state poem called “Happiness,” he reflects on how, for the “ancients,” the “magnificent power of the artistic word was spent […] in vain” (24). He likens this to the way they would allow the tide to splash uselessly against the shore, whereas the One State has “made a domestic animal out of that sparkling, foaming, rabid one” (25).