Why Poetry Matters
A. Poetry doesn’t matter to most people. They go about their business as usual, rarely consulting their Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Frost. One has to wonder if poetry has any place in the 21st century, when music videos and satellite television offer daunting competitions for poems, which demand a good deal of attention and considerable ytic skills, as well as some knowledge of the traditions of poetry.
B. In the 19th century, poets like Scott, Byron and Longfellow had huge audiences around the world. Their works were best sellers, and they were cultural heroes as well. But readers had few choices in those days. One imagines, perhaps falsely, that people actually liked poetry. It provided them with narratives that entertained and inspired. It gave them words to attach to their feelings. They enjoyed folk ballads, too. In a sense, music and poetry joined hands.
C. In the 20th century, something went amiss. Poetry became "difficult". That is, poets began to reflect the complexities of modern culture, its fierce disjunctions. The poems of Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens asked a lot of the reader, including a range of cultural references to topics that even in the early 1900s had become little known. To read Pound and Eliot with ease, for instance, one needed some knowledge of Greek and Latin poetry. That kind of learning had been fairly common among educated readers in the past, when the classics were the bedrock of any upper-middle-class education. The same could not be said for most readers in the 20th century—or today, when education has become more democratized and the study of the classics has been narrowed to a small number of enthusiasts. The poems of the canonical (经典的) poets of high modernism require heavy footnotes.
D. Yet poetry can make a difference in the lives of readers. I’ve always known that myself, having read and written poems for at least four decades. Every morning I begin the day with a book of poems open at the breakfast table. I read a poem, perhaps two. I think about the poetry. I often make notes in my journal. The reading of poetry informs my day, adds brightness to my step, creates shades of feeling that formerly had been unavailable to me. In many cases, I remember lines, whole passages, that float in my head all day—snatches of song, as it were. I firmly believe my life would be infinitely poorer without poetry, its music, its deep wisdom.
E. One tends to forget that poetry is wisdom. I bring to mind Plato, who wished to ban all poets from his ideal republic because he thought they were liars. Reality, for Plato, was an intense, perfect world of ideas. The material world represents reflections of that ideal, always imperfect. Artistic representations of nature were thus at several removes from the ideal, hence suspicious.
F. But Plato also had other worries about poets. In the Republic, he complained that they tend to whip up the emotions of readers in unhelpful ways. They stir feelings of "lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure." Poetry "feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up," he said, while only the "hymns of gods and praises of famous men" are worthy of readers. The law and reason are far better.
G. Although Plato didn’t sink the art of poetry, he cast suspicion on the craft, and poets since then have rarely been comfortable with their place in society. Even the popular Romantic poets—Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and others—lived on the edge of the social whirl, not quite respectable. More recently figures like Allen Ginsberg have laughed at their country. Poets have an unruly streak in them, and have not been the most welcome guests at the table of society.
H. Teachers and professors have long considered poetry a useful part of the curriculum, and one of the last places where poetry, remains a central part of the culture is the classroom. To a degree, poets have been "domesticated" by the academic village, welcomed into its grove. Frost was among the first poets to get a big welcome on the campus, and he taught at Amherst College for much of his life, with periods elsewhere. He spent his last decades wandering the country, appearing at colleges, reading and lecturing to large audiences. He believed firmly in poetry as a means of shaping minds in important ways.
I. In "Education by Poetry", one of his finest essays, Frost argued that an understanding of how poetry works is essential to the developing intellect. He went so far to suggest that unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values, "you don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you." Those are very large claims.
J. Poets do make large claims, and they are usually a bit exaggerated. In his "Defense of Poetry", Shelley famously wrote: "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." I prefer the twist on that offered by a later poet, George Oppen, who wrote: "Poets are the legislators of the unacknowledged world."
K. I don’t especially want poets to make laws or rule the world. For the most part, they would perform very badly in those public ways. The world of the poet is largely an interior world of the intellect and the emotions— where we mostly live, in fact. And poetry bolsters (支持，支援) that interior realm. In a talk at Princeton University in 1942, when the world was aflame, Stevens reflected on the fact that the 20th century had become "so violent", protects us from a violent without. It is the imagination pushing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last ysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of poetry, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives."
L. The pressure of reality is indeed fierce, and yet poetry supplies a kind of counter-pressure, pushing back against external forces that would overwhelm and destroy the individual. Poets give a voice to the world in ways previously unacknowledged. We listen to the still, small voice of poetry when we read a poem, and that voice stands in fierce and violent contrast to the clamor in the culture at large and, often, to the sound of society’s explosions.
Why Poetry MattersPoetry was popular in the 19th century since poetry gave the readers entertainments and inspiration and expressed their feelings as well.