Trevathan 1

The Globalization of Poetry in the 21st Century:

Why Poetry and a Liberal Arts Education is Important

“We don't read and write poetry because it's cute.

We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.

And the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering,

these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life.

But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

The preceding quote from the popular movie, Dead Poets Society, illustrates a

rather important point: Poetry is, like these other noble pursuits,necessary to life. It

helps us answer the question of why we live our lives; it enriches and adorns. Yes,

engineering, science, medicine, law, and business are indeed honorable professions,

and they benefit our lives in many ways. But, poetry has the unique ability to unite us by

making usconsider the common ways we are all related, and illustrating the threads that

weave us together within our global communities. Poetry helps us think of our lives

differently. It challenges how we think of time, what we mean by love, and what we

value. It helps us see how we can be happy and sad at the same time amid the chaos

of discovering our identities. It helps us express both the joys and disappointments that

are part of the human condition: of life, of work, and of being. Poetry allows us to

connect in the globalized world, teaches close reading (especially the ability to read

sub-text), and enhances logic and critical thinking skills.

Before advancing this discussion, I feel that I should define poetry in relation to

other subjectsusually studied by university students. The sciences deal with what we
 Trevathan 2

can call universals: the universal law of gravitation, for example. These universals are

abstractideas which are often produced by creative minds. History, however,deals with

particulars, which are concrete; these concrete facts are represented by such historical

occurrences such as the first man on the moon in 1969. Unlike the sciences, “Poetry is

the art of representing universals concretely in the medium of language. It may be said

to deal with universals because its characters are not individuals but types, and its

incidents not things that have happened but the kinds of things that may happen”

(Buongiorno500). Furthering this idea, poetry is what we consider an art, and art is the

ability to make things.

Theart of poetry has been a staple of literature and culture within the global

community for centuries, but we now see a significant decline of poetic offerings in

publications, large-scale booksellers, and university classrooms. It appearsthat poetry

has withdrawn from the mainstream. Poetry, and the teaching of poetry, is now often

considered unsuitable for college students in more technical or scientific fields because

it tends to be considered inaccessible and not one of the hard sciences; although,

scientists, engineers and doctors were, for many years, taught poetry in the college

classroom under the classic liberal arts education model. While poetry is not one of the

hard sciences, even doctors, scientists, and engineers benefit from the study, and the

reading and writing, of poetry. The United States First Lady, Michelle Obama,writes

that “Poetry helps us connect. When you write poetry, you're not just expressing

yourself. You're also connecting to people. And that's the key to everything we want to

be and do as human beings - is our ability to connect to one another” (Obama).

 Trevathan 3

Unlike the hard sciences, poetry admits not to have the answers; nevertheless it

provides some anyway. It reminds us of our responsibilities as citizens in the world: to

engage with it, to think deeply about it and to interrogate it. By keeping close to a source

of intellectual challenge, we tend toward contemplation because, through poetry, we are

given new ways to think.Robert Frost, writesthat a poem "ends in a clarification of life …

a momentary stay against confusion" (Frost 11), and is testimony to the compelling

enchantment and power that writers find in words—arranged “correctly,” they can bring

order to chaos and clarity to confusion. In “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Frost talks first

about the end of the poetic journey—the “clarification” and “stay against confusion”

mentioned before. These are the enlightened discoveries made by a writer. In the

conclusion of the same essay, Frost describes the process that leads to enlightenment,

by using language both lyrical and beautiful in its own right:“Like a piece of ice on a hot

stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in

being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having

run itself and carried away the poet with it”(12).

The surprise, of course, is the discovery that the writer makes along the way

about some aspect of human experience. Perhaps most importantly, poetry provides

these moments of delight through that ‘momentary stay’and ‘clarification’. The reading

and writing of poetry brings an abundance of skills and tools, and many of these spill

over into other writing forms. Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Roald Hoffman states that

he has “no problems doing research as a scientist and trying to write poetry … Both

science and poetry emerge from an attempt to understand the universe around us – and

from a wish to share that understanding with others in words” (Hoffman140).

 Trevathan 4

Poetry might not be everyone’s favorite form of writing, but reading poetry,

working through some writing exercises, engaging in poetry writing, even just a little bit,

will improve writing in any other forms or genres. As we know, engineers, scientists,

and businesspersons need to write well and have a good command of language to

succeed in their respective careers. Additionally, poetry gives voice to the human

condition, and to our hopes and dreams.

While the human condition or experience is a term frequently used in writing and

analyzing poetry, it is also employed bythose in business, science, and the arts to

express a deeper meaning to one’s life and existence. As the poet, Naomi Shihab Nye

writes, “Skin had hope, that's what skin does. / Heals over the scarred place, makes a

road. / Love means you breathe in two countries(Nye "Two Countries"). Poetry gives us

the ability to breathe in two countries, or to inhabit the skin of both worker and artist;

poet and professional; scientist and dreamer. The poet and civil engineer,Richard

Blanco, who spoke at Barack Obama’s second presidential inauguration,inhabits both

‘skins’ as a respected poet and a successful civil engineer. Blanco writes, “One ground.

Our ground, rooting us to every stalk of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat / and

hands, hands gleaning coal or planting windmills / in deserts and hilltops that keep us

warm, hands / digging trenches, routing pipes and cables … “ (Blanco, “One Today”).

Blanco expresses through poetry the oneness of our communities that build toward a

common purpose.

Our common purpose as academics and as teachers, especially in the Liberal

Arts is to“mold students into well-rounded, well-informed global citizens with a wide skill

set … [and] to advocate for the value and necessity of a broad, liberal education rich in
 Trevathan 5

both technical subjects and the humanities” (VedikaKhemani, New York Times). Mark

Edmundson suggests that the aim of a good liberal-arts education is “to see that we

need not be the passive victims of what we deterministically call circumstances (social,

cultural, or psychological-personal), but that by linking ourselves through what [the poet,

John] Keats calls an 'immortal free-masonry' with the great we can become freer -- freer

to be ourselves, to be what we most want and value” (Edmundson, “On the uses of a

Liberal Arts Education”). Either way, poetry is critical for what it offers the imagination.

Whether that imagination exists in a poet, a scientist, or an engineer, creativity and

imaginative integration benefits our students and greater mankind. As Albert Einstein

once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited;

imagination encircles the world.”

Sadly, many university students are not afforded the possibility of studying

poetry, especially if they are specializing in the technical or scientific fields. The

courses typically devoted to the analysis or writing of poetry are special topics or upper-

level courses geared toward literature majors, and poetry is now phased out of most

college composition courses. This is an unfortunate state of affairs. MehrdadMassoudi,

a mechanical engineering professor writes, even “a person with scientific tendencies

also has the ability to observe, is generally endowed with a (vivid) imagination, … and a

process of critical thinking to make sense of these observations” (Massoudi 115).

Massoudi, like chemist Roald Hoffman, establishes a distinct correlation between

creativity, critical thinking, and scientific study.

It is difficult to define creativity in scientific terms; however, we can acknowledge

that poetry and creativity inhabit the same spheres. Massoudi uses a definition of
 Trevathan 6

creativity that suggests that the creative process is the “emergence in action of a novel

relational product, growing out of the uniqueness of the individual on the one hand, and

the materials, events, people, or circumstances of his life on the other" (117). If we

accept this rather fluid definition of the creative process in relation to the sciences, we

can see how if an engineer or scientist is personally familiar with poetry as a creative

act, he or she can apply that same creative process to technical or scientific

professions.

Poetry is sometimes difficult; however, plenty of us would agree that the most

difficult things in life are often the most rewarding. Poetry is like that, too. As the poet,

Rainer Maria Rilke, writes, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to

love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in

a very foreign tongue” (Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet). Engaging with an art form that

does not immediately yield its meaning, while also requiring work on the part of the

reader, can teach us to remain content in uncertainty, and to work for what is valuable,

much like the valuable work a scientist or engineer might do. Part of the work in the

sciences is being patient with uncertainty. Poetry offers intellectual challenge that even

science and technology students can learn by working through a poem, and they, too,

can learn to love the questions themselves. As Willis Barnstone suggests “Translating

from one language to another is a mathematical task, and the translation of a lyrical

poem … into a foreign language is quite analogous to a mathematical problem”

(Barnstone 19).

When we look for and engage with it, poetry provides an intellectual challenge

allowing us to become more contemplative in responding to important, global concerns.

 Trevathan 7

This idea that poetry provides us with tools for responding to the world is not a new one.

The poet, Percy Shelley writes in his prose work, “A Defence of Poetry,”“Poets are the

hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration…the influence which is moved not, but

moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (Shelley 90). In Shelley,

“we find the reverence with which he regarded his art…We discern his power of close

reasoning and the unity of his views of human nature” (7).

In a more contemporary book which, like Shelley’s, defends the necessity of

poetry, Mark Edmundsonwrites that Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another great poet of the

Romantic period, believed that philosophy and poetry could solve each other’s problems

… through the exercise of the poetic imagination, and more specifically through the

imagination’s symbol-making power” (Edmundson 33). Coleridge’s systematic method

for describing and evaluating poetry, and his theory of the secondary imagination with

its capacity to idealize and unify the affirmation of the cohesive symbol, helps define

poetry as the “creative activity of genius and one of the simplest acts of thought [which]

are but products of the laws of universal logic” (34). Poetry aids the creative

imagination through the use of symbols and logic, both of which are excellent tools for

critical thinkingessential for success in the technical and scientific fields.

Poetry,and the education one receives in the liberal arts,helps us understand the

questions of civilization, and of scientific and cosmological inquiry: Who are we? What is

the cosmos? What is our place in the cosmos?In a 1915 letter to Harriet Monroe, Ezra

Pound describes his activities as a poet and writer as an attemptto "… set the arts in

their rightful place as the acknowledged guide and lamp of civilization” (Pound). By

using poetry for teaching purposes, we enable our students to negotiateintellectual

 Trevathan 8

challenges – a skill necessary for future success. Poetry’sintellectual challenge

fosterscreativity, allows us to connect to the globalized world, and enhances critical

thinking. Words and ideas can change the world.

Works Cited

Barnstone, Willis. The Poetics of Translation. New Haven: Yale U.P., 1993. Print.

Blanco, Richard. “One Today.” President Barack Obama’s Swearing-in Ceremony, 21

January 2013. Web.

Buongiorno, Andrew. “Poetry as an Educational Instrument.” Bulletin of the American

Association of University Professors, 33:3 (1947). 500-509. JSTOR.

Edmundson, Mark. Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida: A Defence of

Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1995. Print.

Edmundson, Mark. “On the uses of a Liberal Arts Education” Harper’s Magazine,

September 1997. Web.

Frost, Robert. “The Figure a Poem Makes.” 1939. Web.

Hoffman, Roald. “On Poetry & the Language of Science.” Daedalus, 131:2 (2002).

137 – 140. JSTOR.

Khemani, Vedika. “Why a Liberal Arts Education Matters.” India Blogs, New York Times.

1 February 2012. Web.

Massoudi, Mehrdad. “Can Scientific Writing Be Creative?” Journal of Science Education

and Technology, 12:2 (2003). 115 – 128. JSTOR.

Nye, Naomi Shihab. "Two Countries.” Words Under the Words: Selected Poems.

Portland: Far Corner, 1995.

 Trevathan 9

Obama, Michelle. “Poetry Helps Us Connect.” The St. Louis American. 9 June 2011.

Web.

Pound, Ezra. Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907 – 1941. Ed. D.D. Paige. New York:

New Directions Publishing, 1950.

Rilke, Rainer Maria.Letters to a Young Poet.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry.”Interactive Archive. Web.