Someone read a column of mine and meeting me asked very sincerely What is the practical value of Poetry, Ian?
A cocktail party, where all conversation has to be chopped ruthlessly into innocuous bits of gossip and if any discussion threatens to become interesting the accepted rule is that it must be interrupted – a cocktail party is hardly the occasion to deliver a considered answer to such a question. But I think I might take a little space to try again to explain why poetry has always been one of my greatest passions, why I have always believed that true poets are more important than, say, even the most powerful politician or ruthlessly successful businessman, and why I consider the promotion of poetry, in schools especially, of vital importance.
The first thing to be said is that reading poetry gives me immense pleasure. But my questioner had a point. Poetry, as it is understood today, is not associated with the giving or getting of value. It is considered a strange, dull business, written by eccentric people, and it is believed that the duty of reading and understanding it should be left strictly to those whose job it is to do such things. What has happened, and why my questioner represents the huge majority of people, is that poetry has become almost wholly a preserve of the specialists and the academics. The English poet, Philip Larkin, put it this way:
“We seem to be producing a new kind of bad poetry, not the old kind that tries to move the ordinary reader and fails, but one that does not even try. Repeatedly he is confronted with pieces that cannot be understood without reference beyond their own limits or whose contented insipidity argues that their authors are merely reminding themselves of what they know already, rather than re-creating it for a third party. The reader, in fact, seems no longer present in the poet’s mind as he used to be, as someone who must understand and enjoy the finished product if it is to be successful at all; the assumption is that no one will read I, and wouldn’t understand or enjoy it if they did.”
Fortunately, I was brought up and taught to read poetry that at once delighted me and ever since the beauty and truth of the best poetry has enthralled me. Fundamentally, poetry, like all art, must be bound up with giving pleasure – and that is the first reason why I read it.
The second reason for reading good poetry is because it has to do with clarity of expression and, therefore, clarity of thought. Poets work at the frontiers of language. They are engaged in the struggle for clarity and meaning and those who wrestle with and refine language in order to be lucid and articulate are, in a crucial sense, the guardians of the accumulated richness of our written and spoken inheritance. Anyone preoccupied with imparting the importance of writing well – expressing oneself clearly, concisely, and powerfully – must have poetry at the centre of their preoccupation. That is why the decline in teaching poetry in the schools is such a tragedy. A nation can feel no greater loss than when poetry is neglected and the excellent use of language atrophies.
In the end, however, once cannot explain this love of poetry. A.E. Housman said that when he read true poetry he felt the hair rise on the nape of his neck. That’s it. When I first saw Rohan Kanhai bat I felt something like that. And I feel it when I read the best poetry – Derek Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight” or Martin Carter’s “This is the Dark Time my Love” for instance, or, the great poem “Farewell” by the American poet Mark Strand which begins:
It is true, as someone has said, that in
A world without Heaven all is farewell.
Whether you wave your hand or not,
It is farewell, and if no tears come to your eyes
It is still farewell, and if you pretend not to notice,
Hating what passes, it is still farewell.
Farewell no matter what. And the palms as they lean
Over the green, bright lagoon and the pelicans
Diving, and the glistening bodies of bathers resting
Are stages in an ultimate stillness, and the movement
Of sand, and of wind, and the secret moves of the
body
Are part of the same, a simplicity that turns being
Into an occasion for mourning, or into an occasion
Worth celebrating, for what else does one do,
Feeling the weight of the pelicans’ wings,
The density of the palms’ shadows, the cells that
darken
The backs of bathers? These are beyond the
distortions
Of chance, beyond the evasions of music. The end
Is enacted again and again. And we feel it
In the temptations of sleep, in the moon’s ripening,
In the wine as it waits in the glass.
The truth is, if you do not read poetry, there is a void
in your life. But I couldn’t say all that at a cocktail
party, more’s the pity.
