This paper examines silence not as the failure of political poetry to speak but as one of its most deliberate formal strategies. In contexts of censorship, surveillance, and state violence, poets have long used omission, blank space, redaction, and unfinished syntax to register what direct statement cannot safely or adequately convey. This paper builds a critical vocabulary for reading these strategies, drawing on Sontag’s account of the aesthetics of silence, Said’s writing on culture under conditions of domination, and Foucault’s analysis of discourse and power. The paper argues that silence in political poetry operates on two registers simultaneously: as a protective strategy that allows a poet to gesture toward forbidden content without stating it outright, and as an aesthetic argument that the scale of certain historical violence exceeds the capacity of direct language to represent it. These two functions are not separate motivations but a single formal choice, since the poem that withholds direct statement under conditions of repression often thereby also performs, in its very withholding, an argument about the limits of representation. The paper concludes by proposing that silence should be treated as an active formal resource within the study of political poetry, rather than as a gap to be filled by biographical or historical context, since the meaning of the silence lies precisely in its refusal to be filled.