“A SINGLE VERSE by Rimbaud,” writes Dominique de Villepin, the new French Prime Minister, “shines like a powder trail on a day’s horizon. It sets it ablaze all at once, explodes all limits, draws the eyes to other heavens.” Here is a rather different observation, uttered by George Bush Sr in 1998, that might stand as a motto for his dynasty: “I can’t do poetry.”

In that gulf of sensibility lies the cultural faultline of our times. For George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld words are blunt instruments, used to convey meaning, not feeling. Actions speak louder. The President of France, by contrast, rocked by the rejection of the EU constitution, has attempted to shore up his Government by appointing a poet as his Prime Minister, a patrician intellectual in the French romantic mould, a true believer in the transcendental and redemptive power of words.

These are the polar extremes of poetry, Rimbaud in one corner and Rambo in the other: the French patron saint of sensitive, tortured adolescents alongside the monosyllabic American action man.

M de Villepin’s poetry — four volumes so far — is a triumph of French style over substance, a torrent of adjectival acrobatics: grand, uplifting and painfully obscure. He speaks in a grandiloquent style that delights French audiences, but baffles most English-speakers. His high-flown rhetoric before the United Nations in the build-up to the Iraq war (“We are the guardians of an ideal”) marked him as the political and cultural antithesis to the US, and his appointment is intended to send the message that French exceptionalism is alive and well.

M de Villepin has set himself 100 days to restore French self-confidence, to infuse France with a sense of its poetic destiny: “We need a heart that beats for everyone.” For this poet, practical considerations are secondary. As he wrote in his recent 823-page treatise on French poetry: “What does it matter where this path leads, nowhere or elsewhere, if the furrow continues flowering, if the flash of lightning still inflames the night . . . If the poet still consumes himself, he refuses the enclosures of thought, certainties, to camp in the heart of the mystery, in the living spirit of the flame.”

To which the American response will be a resounding: “Whatever.” The Bush White House does not do poetry. At a Nato summit in Prague, Donald Rumsfeld was once forced to sit though a performance of modern dance and poetry. Asked for his reaction afterwards, he shrugged: “I’m from Chicago.”

Les Anglo-Saxons — as Villepin likes to categorise America and Britain — have seldom mixed poetry and politics. There have been numerous British writer-statesmen, but no poet-politician of note. Clement Attlee scribbled self-mocking limericks, but can you imagine Tony Blair penning anything more poetic than pop lyrics? John Prescott might have been invented for the purposes of doggerel: “There was a young man from ’ull/ Who usually spoke total bull . . .” Abraham Lincoln and John Quincy Adams were both published poets, but in modern times the only president-poet was Jimmy Carter. His 44-poem collection Always, as brave as it is bad, was received with thinly disguised and richly deserved mockery: “The geese passed overhead/and then without a word/We went down to a peaceful sleep/Marvelling at what we’d seen and heard.” John F. Kennedy commissioned Robert Frost to deliver a poem at his inauguration, and Bill Clinton had Maya Angelou do the same. But poetry does not stir the soul of President Bush, unless you count the Bible and George Jones singing A Good Year for the Roses.

To the Anglo-Saxon mind there is something dodgy, even dangerous, in the man who rules the world by day and writes verses by night. As W.H. Auden wrote: “All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornados, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.” Indeed, the precedents are not happy ones, for there is a peculiar link between frustrated poetic ambition and tyranny: Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, Castro, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh all wrote poetry. Radovan Karadzic, fugitive former leader of the Bosnian Serbs, once won the Russian Writers’ Union Mikhail Sholokhov Prize for his poems. On the whole, you do not want a poet at the helm.

Yet in France, proof of a refined literary consciousness is a prerequisite of high office, and the virtue that eclipses sin. When François Mitterrand died, French commentators touched only briefly on such aspects of his career as wartime collaboration, cynical political opportunism and obsessive adultery, while devoting acres of print to his love of books and remarkable literary output. Every French politician is expected to produce a trophy bouquin. Before writing the ailing

EU constitution, former President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing penned sensitive novels.

M de Villepin has placed himself firmly in the tradition of French diplomat-poets. In the preface to his 2003 book he effused: “This eulogy owes nothing to artifice or chance. It has ripened inside me since childhood. From the bottom of my pockets, stuck to the back of my smock, hidden in the corner of abacuses, poetry gushed out.” That statement immediately earned him a nomination as Poseur of the Year by a New York newspaper.

His appointment is certain to increase the accusations of pretentiousness from the American side, and philistinism from the French. The chasm has never been wider, or more in need of a bridge. America’s public image could benefit from a sense of imaginative wonder, a little more Rimbaud and a lot less Rambo. Anglo-Saxon mockery is the essential antidote to Left Bank belle lettrism, which too often uses poetic complexity to state the obvious, or nothing at all.

George Bush and Dominique de Villepin might learn much from each other, but no amount of translation could allow them to speak the same language. In the aftermath of 9/11, M de Villepin walked through Manhattan: “In the flayed city, facing the raging winds, I called upon the words of Rimbaud, Artaud or Duprey. At such a grave hour, how could one not think of these thieves of fire who lit up, for centuries, the furnaces of the heart and the imagination, of thirst and insomnia, to build an empire only within oneself.” Mr Bush also surveyed the city, but did not think of poetry or imagination: he invaded Afghanistan.

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