Why is poetry important?
Writing a good poem means capturing truth through language. To do that, you have to avoid cliché and you need to pry open your unexamined habits of thought -- so writing a poem, or interpreting one, involves analytical thinking and the precise control of language. The arts in general encourage empathy, curiosity, and imagination.
It’s easy to undervalue those things because their benefits are hard to quantify, but Donald Trump could not have been elected President of the United States if there hadn’t been a widespread failure of empathy, analytical thought, and attention to the nuances of language. In my life as a creative writing professor, I sometimes get students to read George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” in which he writes, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible … Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” Orwell wrote that in 1945, but it remains true.
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