I hear the chorus: “poetry is boring”, “poetry is impossible to understand”, “poetry is irrelevant,” “poetry has no place in this computer age,” “poetry is for academics.” Many times I have heard those who have read a little quote Auden’s “Poetry makes nothing happen” – great Auden whose poetry will continue to transfix and transform the imagination of man for as long as anyone can think or feel.
There are many answers on many levels to this parade of doubters and scoffers. At a pragmatic level poetry is important because at its best it is the supreme embodiment of the most expressive use of language. Language is the single most striking attribute which differentiates us from other animals. It should be clear, therefore, to anyone who thinks for a moment that an increasing mastery of language equips the growing child better and better for a successful, confident, completely fulfilled life in his or her future. Poetry at its best represents the ultimate mastery of language. Children, but all of us as well, should aspire to understand and enjoy such mastery.
Poetry is important for more complex reasons. Poetry may not make anything happen in the external world. But in the infinitely influential interior world of men’s imagination it is a revolutionary force. The nobility of poetry, Wallace Stevens wrote in his essay “The Noble Rider and the Sounds of Words”, “is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without”.
The activist, the man or the world, the politician, the businessman cannot easily comprehend the poet offering a response to reality which has a liberating and verifying effect upon the individual spirit. They will always want poetry somehow to prove itself more than an imagined response to conditions in the world. They will urgently want to know why it should not be an applied art, harnessed to action which tries to influence conditions in the world. Such movers and shakers whose ambition is to get things done will not understand for one moment the concept that the poet is a potent figure because he or she “creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and….gives life to the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of that world”.
In his wonderful essay, “The Redress of Poetry”, which he delivered as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, Seamus Heaney explains how great poetry operates as a countervailing force against power in place, accepted wisdom, traditional views, the weight of current opinion, the controllers of the world as it is. Those engaged in the daily exercise of authority will always want poetry to exert leverage on behalf of their point of view, require the entire weight of the marvelous thing poetry is to come down on their side of the scales. To take one example, successive Governments in Guyana, and every single political party competing for office and power, hastens to find lines in the poetry of Martin Carter to support their views and declarations.
The great poets are very unlikely to endorse prevailing power. If you were an English poet in the First World War the pressure was for you to contribute to the war effort by dehumanizing the face of the enemy – but Wilfred Owen saw instead the German soldier as an intimate friend and a secret sharer in the world‘s horrors. And if you were an American poet at the height of the Vietnam War, the official expectation would have been for you to wave the Stars and Stripes with full patriotic rhetoric – but Robert Lowell saw instead that terrible South Asian expedition as an imperial betrayal. We know the fate of Osip Mandelstam when his poetry challenged Stalin’s terror. And the poets of America called daily attention to the tragic consequences which would befall George W. Bush’s war against Iraq and the Muslim world in the name of overthrowing a tyrant.
These countervailing poetic gestures – and innumerable others throughout mankind’s chequered history – have enormous, cumulative force. They get into and overturn the imagination and then the beliefs of men and women and eventually the world turns in new directions. These poetic gestures are particular instances of a great human law which has perhaps been best and most succinctly expressed by the French mystic Simone Weil: “If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale……we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, ‘that fugitive from the camp of conquerors’.”
There is an understandable but terrible inclination in most human beings to side with power, with those who control the shape and direction of the world, regardless of what is just or unjust. That is the source of immense evil and great disasters.
Simone Weil wrote in her book Gravity and Grace, “Obedience to the force of gravity is the greatest sin”. That is the creed of those on the side of the wretched of the earth. It is also poetry’s deepest and most subtle creed.