Why is poetry important?
There are many angles from which to look at the importance of poetry.
As someone who spent much of my career as a public interest attorney, I love thinking about how poetry can open hearts and minds. Taking into account W.H. Auden’s great saying that “poetry makes nothing happen,” on the other hand, I’m struck that Percy Bysshe Shelley, called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world, “in freeing our imaginations, our profound sense of what’s right, our visceral connection to the world around us.” Or as Audre Lorde put it, “poetry is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” I don’t think you can quite say that about any other form of writing. I like to think poetry can help galvanize readers to address issues like the environmental crisis or the crisis of racism in our society head on, with enthusiasm and without the paralyzing fear that leads to indifference and inaction. As the Malaysian poet Cecil Rajendra put it, “…I want the cadences of my verse to crack/the carapace of indifference/prise open torpid eyelids/thick-coated with silver...”
As to the importance of poetry, the great Kiowa poet N. Scott Momaday said: “I believe poetry is the highest form of verbal expression.” And in the words of the poet Vievee Francis, in “A Small Poem,” “…a single word/ can set the world turning from one moment into/the next in startlement.”
A poem can say what has never been said before, at least in that way, and by that person. That possibility of a wild freshness of language is unique to poetry. And like music, like art, poetry is “play.” As the poet William Matthews said, “Content is often unsettling or painful in poems, but form is play, a residue of the fun the poet had while working. Of course, like form and content, pain and fun want to be each other.”
Poetry can be a source of comfort. When the philosopher Richard Rorty was dying, he talked about how he found no consolation in religion or philosophy. The only thing he found of use was poetry, finding consolation in the images and the rhyme and rhythm. “In lines such as these,” he writes of Swinburne and Landor, images, rhyme and rhythm “conspire to produce a degree of compression, and thus of impact, that only verse can achieve.”
Poetry is a way to declare our freedom. The great Turkish poet, Nazim Hikmet, imprisoned for his beliefs, wrote of his love of life from prison, in his “Letters From a Man in Solitary,” “Sunday today./Today they took me out in the sun for the first time./And I just/stood there, struck for the first time in my life/by how far away the sky is,/how blue/and how wide./Then I respectfully sat down on the earth./I leaned back against the wall./For a /moment no trap to fall into,/no struggle, no freedom, no wife./Only earth, sun, and me…/I am happy.”
Poetry helps us remember not to take life for granted, reminding us, as the secular Buddhist philosopher Stephen Batchelor says, “How extraordinary it is to be here at all.” Poetry may be the closest thing we have to prayer in a secular world. It can bring solace to the poet, and also to the reader. A poem that is to me very much like prayer is Lucille Clifton’s “blessing the boats”: “may the tide/that is entering even now/the lip of our understanding/carry you out/beyond the face of fear/may you kiss/the wind then turn from it/certain that it will/love your back may you/open your eyes to water/water waving forever/and may you in your innocence/sail through this to that.”
As secular prayer, poetry can celebrate, mourn, inspire. And maybe, ultimately, the most wonderful thing about poetry is that it says the unsayable. As poet laureate Joy Harjo put it, "I think of poetry as a place beyond words... you know, the paradox is, we use words to get there."
