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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). Poetry, therefore, is esteemed because it has practical use rather than being regarded as having any innate value.

With the building of the Integral, writing and poetry takes on new forms. The One State intends to use “the power of words” (1) to make other planets join them. The One State Benefactor entreats its citizens to write “poems […] odes and other compositions on the greatness and beauty of the One State” (1). In this way, the instrumentalizing of expressive writing here goes beyond the consolidation of the social order and spills over into cosmic expansionism. This effort has unforeseen consequences for the One State’s future. For, as D-503 finds with his journal, writing for others outside the One State inadvertently raises questions about the state’s alleged perfection. This process begins innocently enough for D-503. As he says, in trying to explain “the Hour Tables, Personal Hours, Green Wall, Benefactor […] it is as though […] a writer of the twentieth century should start to explain in his novel such words as coat, apartment, wife” (4). The need to describe features of life in the One State to those unfamiliar with them necessarily involves contrast, and contrast with the past leads to contemplation.

However, this contemplation quickly becomes subversive. Although D-503 repeatedly insists that the past is inferior and “behind, below” (53) the present, he cannot resist the draw of the world of nostalgia. Linked to his attraction to I-330, D-503 starts to see the past, as represented by the Ancient House, as something of inherent and essential value. For example, he sees in the past clothes and music a freedom and erotic energy lacking in the present. At the same time, this nostalgia inevitably opens onto a future. D-503 reasons that if things were different in the past, it is possible to imagine that they might be different again, and the present might change. Such thinking, bound up with D-503’s journal writing, ultimately leads to his involvement in the Mephi plot. It is also why D-503 abandons his journal when renouncing his rebellion against the One State. As he says, “I cannot write any more—I no longer want to” (89). Realizing too late his writing’s subversive potential, he renounces the power of words, an act that symbolically prefigures the state’s erasure of his imagination.