The Chronicle Review, Feb.

2008
Why Poetry Matters

By JAY PARINI
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 competition for poems, which
demand a good deal of attention and
considerable analytic skills, as well as some
knowledge of the traditions of poetry.
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.
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 relegated to a small
number of enthusiasts. The poems of the
canonical poets of high modernism require
heavy footnotes.
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 the
poem 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 [see; George
Steiner’s (1929-2020) idea of “ingestion”
vs “digestion” in his seminal book Real
Presences]. I firmly believe my life would
be infinitely poorer without poetry, its
music, its deep wisdom.
One tends to forget that poetry is wisdom. I
was in Morocco recently, and a devout
Muslim mentioned to me that the Prophet
Muhammad, in his book of sayings, the
Hadith, had said as much. But the Koran
also teaches, I was told, that poets are
dangerous, and that decent people should
avoid them. That reminded me of 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.
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 the gods and praises of
famous men" are worthy of readers. The
law and reason are far better.
Although Plato didn't quite 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 derided
their country. Poets have an unruly streak
(stripe, vein) in them, and have not been the
most welcome guests at the table of society.
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 [ so was with MUSIC]—
Walter Pater (1839-1894), the fin-de-siecle
aesthete and scholar said: “All arts aspire to
the condition of music”]. 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 stints
[periods]elsewhere. He spent his last
decades crisscrossing 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.
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 as 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.
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 [1908 New
Rochelle, NY, USA-1994 CA],
 G. Oppen

who wrote: "Poets are the legislators of the

unacknowledged world."
Oppen’s success continued with his next book, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning collection Of Being Numerous (New
Directions, 1968), an examination of the city as man’s
highest expression of himself.
Of Being Numerous: Sections 1-22
Launch Audio in a New Window
BY GEORGE OPPEN
1

There are things

We live among ‘and to see them
Is to know ourselves’.

Occurrence, a part
Of an infinite series,

The sad marvels;

Of this was told

A tale of our wickedness.
It is not our wickedness.

‘You remember that old town we went to, and we sat in

the ruined window, and we tried to imagine that we
belonged to those times—It is dead and it is not dead, and
you cannot imagine either its life or its death; the earth
speaks and the salamander speaks, the Spring comes and
only obscures it—’
2

So spoke of the existence of things,

An unmanageable pantheon

Absolute, but they say

Arid.
A city of the corporations

Glassed
In dreams

And images—

And the pure joy

Of the mineral fact

Tho it is impenetrable

As the world, if it is matter,

Is impenetrable.
3

The emotions are engaged

Entering the city
As entering any city.

We are not coeval

With a locality
But we imagine others are,

We encounter them. Actually

A populace flows
Thru the city.

This is a language, therefore, of New York

Back to Parini’s text:
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 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," both physically and spiritually.
He succinctly defined poetry as "a violence
from within that protects us from a violence
without. It is the imagination pushing back
against the pressure of reality. It seems, in
the last analysis, 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."
The pressure of reality is indeed fierce, and
yet poetry supplies a kind of
counterpressure, pushing back against
external forces that would overwhelm and
obliterate 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 ferocious
contrast to the clamor in the culture at large
and, often, to the sound of society's
explosions.
I always define poetry for my students as a
language adequate to our experience — to
our full experience, taking into account the
interior valleys, the peaks, the broad plains.
It gives voice to tiny thoughts, to what the
Scottish poet and scholar Alastair Reid, in a
lovely poem, calls "Oddments Inklings
Omens [augary, portent, sign …]Moments."
One does not hope for poetry to change the
world. Auden noted when he wrote in his
elegy for Yeats that "poetry makes nothing
happen." That is, it doesn't shift the stock
market or persuade dictators to stand down.
It doesn't usually send masses into the
streets to protest a war or petition for
economic justice. It works in quieter ways,
shaping the interior space of readers, adding
a range of subtlety to their thoughts,
complicating the world for them.
Language defines us as human beings. We
speak, therefore we exist. We have the
miraculous ability to gesture in words, to
make statements and requests, to express
our feelings, to construct arguments, to
draw conclusions. Poetic language matters
because it is precise and concrete, and
draws us closer to the material world. In
Nature, Emerson argues that the sheer
physicality of words points us in directions
that might be called "spiritual." He puts
forward three principles worth considering:
"Words are signs of natural facts."
"Particular natural facts are symbols of
particular spiritual facts."
"Nature is the symbol of the spirit."
Those statements formed a platform of sorts
for the Transcendental movement, which
studied nature closely for signs of spiritual
life. The principles remain worthy of
reflection. At some level, words suggest
natural facts: "rock," "river," "bird,"
"cloud." The leap comes in the second
statement, which posits a spiritual world.
One can, I think, leap beyond conventional
notions of spirituality here and
acknowledge a deep interior world wherein
each of us lives, no matter what our
religious persuasion. I think of a line from
Gerard Manley Hopkins: "O the mind,
mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful,
sheer, no-man-fathomed." The mind has
those heights and depths, and few have not
sensed them, stood in awe of their terrifying
majesty. That is the spiritual realm, which
one can extend in any direction. Nature
becomes, at last, Emerson's "symbol of the
spirit," and poetry itself embodies that
nature. It is part of it. It mirrors the vast
interior world, populates it with images and
phrases, provides a basis for the reality of
individual lives.
I could not live without poetry, which has
helped me to live my existence more
concretely, more deeply. It has shaped my
thinking. It has enlivened my spirit. It has
offered me ways to endure my life (I'm
rephrasing Dr. Johnson here), even to enjoy
it.
Jay Parini is a novelist, poet, and professor
of English at Middlebury College. His
latest book, Why Poetry Matters, was
published in April by Yale University Press.

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Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 54, Issue 42, Page B16