Why Read Poetry?

This essay is a draft of an introduction to Every Reader’s Poets, a book of criticism for the common reader, nine chapters for which have been posted at this site.


The thought of what America,
The thought of what America,
The thought of what America would be like
If the Classics had a wide circulation . . .
Oh well!
It troubles my sleep.

“Cantico del Sole” Ezra Pound



     Why read poetry? Perhaps this brief introduction may demonstrate in some small way the power of words. Though they are nothing but symbolic patterns on a page, the reader, having scanned those codes in black and white, will likely find that something has changed. Potentially a mind, but also (or instead) it may possibly be the slightest of alterations arising from a passing wind of laughter or of fear, a sniff of the sublime, a spark of enlightenment. We know nothing whatever apart from our perceptions, and art records human states of consciousness more precisely than any other artifact. We are signaling to each other on this journey, and knowing what to make of our fellow travelers is really the only way to know even oneself.
     While a good many Americans today write poetry, fewer read it. Though it is the golden age of the open mike and the community poetry reading, with far more venues offering regular poetry events than ever before, I fear that the general familiarity with what were once confidently labeled great writers has declined to the vanishing point. Poetry plays an ever-decreasing role in secondary and higher education. Even English majors who devour high heaps of fiction and criticism manage to remain largely innocent of poetry these days, particularly the poetry of the past. The old area requirements for literary scholars – Old English, Middle English, Elizabethan, Restoration, and the like -- have withered. When J. M. Dent founded the Everyman series over a hundred years ago for people like himself who appreciated literature whether or not they had a university degree or a bank account, there was a market for such an idea. When Virginia Woolf addressed her essays to the “common reader,” such a creature still existed. At about the same time in the United States The Harvard Universal Classics, “Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf,” appeared. Shortly thereafter, literature became available to all with the exceedingly cheap little blue books – many cost a nickel -- from the Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company of Girard, Kansas which included, among many other titles, Plato, Goethe, booklets on philosophy by Will Durant, socialist and atheist tracts, and sex information titles. A few decades later Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler put together a classier package: The Great Books of the Western World and the Encyclopedia Brittanica Company knew it would find plenty of readers in the great breadth of the American middle class. A body of culture, ethnocentric and biased indeed, but rich and rewarding nonetheless, was then shared by most educated people. “High culture” exerted a gravitational pull on even the mass media with the production of original dramas and even opera on television. Even those unexposed to Shakespeare, Verdi, and Rembrandt felt certain that such icons must hold something worthwhile and deserving of respect.
     Now, however, the direction of influence has largely reversed as public radio and television strive for more of People magazine’s demographic through covering rock ‘n’ roll and the latest HBO series. Intellectuals feel they must wear baseball caps and sound like the guy next door. The closest approach to a shared culture in America is the utterly commodified television shows, movies, and music made to appeal to hoi polloi but also patronized by people who, in the past, would have, in the past, at least given a nod to “high culture.”
     If poetry is worth reading, then, many intelligent readers will benefit from an introduction or a re-introduction to at least a few highlights of the canon. In offering these essays my goal is to supply that need. Criticism can be highly technical with as much jargon and as many subspecialties as physics. Why should the general public take any interest in acquiring such expertise when poets are not expected to master computer programming, entomology, or realms of mathematics beyond what is needed to calculate taxes?
     One would, of course, be quite right to emphasize the many practical functional ends for reading. It is true that in the consumption of poetry one practices the general intellectual skills of taking in information, processing it, and generating original ideas in reaction. These abilities are indispensable for any cognitive labor. In the Victorian Age, students were all drilled in very demanding poetry, couched in the complex grammatical systems of ancient Latin and Greek, whatever their vocational goals might be. The future banker, general, businessman, and bureaucrat all translated passages of Shakespeare into Latin and puzzled over the mysteries of the Greek particle while they were yet in secondary school. The theory was, of course, that in doing so they were performing mental calisthenics so demanding that the requirements of any future career would be simple by comparison. This may have been carrying matters a bit too far.
     Still, the ability to consume difficult texts rapidly, and even more the ability to speak and write elegantly does provide an advantage for the verbally competent which is so great as to be even unfair. A fluent speaker will be persuasive and a proficient writer will carry the day in virtually any setting. People’s intelligence is judged, often, it may be, unfairly, by their verbal skills just as they may be judged on appearance, so one who wishes to get ahead can do no better than to cultivate superlative ability with language. This is not entirely a matter of the rhetorical surface; the good writer is likely to be the effective reasoner as well. In part because American students never learn logic or philosophy, writing class is by default the sole place where one learns how to make one’s ideas convincing to others.
     Magisterially, we ignore all that. There are even more compelling reasons for reading poetry.
     One reason, surprisingly, is biological. The owners of even the most domestic of house cats may see their sweet lap-sitter turn to a merciless killer at the first opportunity. Pussy may seem possessed by unaccustomed excitement, she may suddenly appear with a slightly bloody little corpse or leap into the air to seize a bird in mid-flight. When the cat acts like a cat, even a vegan pet owner can hardly resist feeling admiration at the efficiency of the animal’s skills and the grace of its movements. Similarly, the sight of a hummingbird hovering at a flower or the coordinated action of a thousand ants in a colony inspires most viewers with awe and a sense of beauty. Each of these animals is practicing its highest evolutionary skills, the activities that its DNA is programmed to perform with dazzling exhilarating competence.
     As human beings our most highly developed evolutionary skill is the manipulation of symbols. Language is only the most sophisticated symbolic system our species employs, and poetry is the most concentrated form of linguistic code. Poetry carries a heavier weight of signification per word or line than any other form of discourse. Thus in reading poetry we are exercising our nature to a paramount degree.
     This is the reason we experience pleasure in poetry, and pleasure, though still not quite respectable, has been a chief end of art since prehistoric times. People construct and consume works of art to pass the time in pleasant play. Tribal people tell each other stories to transmit culture, to be sure, but also for the same reason that other people listened to Jack Benny on the radio, for simple amusement. Such pleasure ranges widely, from a laugh at a Louis C. K. punch line or a shiver of anxiety at a paragraph of Stephen King through the sentimental comedy of Trollope and Dickens or a frisson of sympathetic sexual energy upon hearing a blues song, to what we think of as the heights of the sublime in the Oresteia or a late Beethoven quartet.
     In perhaps the most hackneyed and misleading formula of all literary criticism, Horace declared that poetry should provide not only pleasure but instruction, which is to say useful knowledge. Just what sort of knowledge can arise from literature is often unclear. On the vulgar level, and sometimes among the sophisticated as well, a notion persists that artists are somehow wiser, more insightful than the general run of humanity and that we readers might benefit from their valuable insights cleverly encoded in their work. A highly humane English professor of my acquaintance never lost the faith that familiarity with poetry would render all the world more humane. To him the widely-read person would inevitably treat lovers and enemies alike in a more enlightened fashion and perhaps even lead society as a whole to a more sensible political regime. Alas, this cannot be, if only because the artist is not privy to any insights unavailable to the rest of us. The poet’s exceptional skill is not in ethics or politics but only in the use of language and the construction of objets d’art made of words.
     Yet we do learn a great deal from reading. Some of what we learn has nothing whatever to do with the nature of art whereas other insights might be available from non-aesthetic sources. For instance, the historian might study Beowulf for evidence of Old English legal codes, or a military strategist might analyze battles in the Iliad. Such information has nothing necessarily literary about it. Yet one traditional element of literary texts, indeed it might seem the most significant judging from high school classes (and many in university), is theme, what the text implies about lived experience. We benefit from such thematic exposition not because the author is more perspicacious than ourselves, but because the text provides another viewpoint, another take on reality, another world-view. Simply understanding deeply how a situation can look to others broadens an individual’s vision by a sort of imaginative triangulation.
     Every work implies a set of assumptions about history, psychology, and philosophy. Just as we all live inside of history, every text is also inscribed with the circumstances of its creation. The author’s own political views are in the end irrelevant; what matters is what is implied on the page. A macho writer is likely, in fact, to reveal more about the social role of women than a more progressive one. Furthermore, every text concerns human attitudes or actions and thus must carry information about how the mind operates; in fact, virtually every piece of writing reflects on the writer as well as the personae portrayed. Finally, every work also conveys traces of a philosophic worldview. (Indeed, even the less heavily weighted utterances of everyday life do the same in a more dilute way.)
     Yet, whatever value one may place on the insights of littérateurs, we have as well other disciplines for investigating those realms: history, economics, and political science for investigating social structures, psychology and neurology for the mind, and philosophy and theology for the ultimate questions. Art is unique, however, in its capacity, far greater than other forms of discourse, to represent the authentic face of human consciousness. By arising from one subjectivity and appealing to another, poetry, fiction, and drama can fully delineate the affective aspect of mind, which often dominates our own lived experience. The universal pursuit of pleasure and aversion to pain is likewise fully rendered in imaginative literature.
     Equally importantly, only the aesthetic text can by design provide insight into the irrational (and far more of our thinking is irrational than we allow ourselves to suppose) bases for thought. Often conflicted, especially when dealing with the most significant issues of human life such as love and aggression, the mind is best represented by fiction and poetry which are uniquely equipped to investigate the ambivalent and the paradoxical. Finally, art has since its appearance forty thousand years ago, been associated with religion, broadly conceived as concern with Ultimate Reality. Though theology may offer some insights about the human perception of the divine, psychology about love, and medicine about death, the most meaningful impressions are those without the pretense of objectivity. Indeed, though art can offer only another subjectivity, the fact is that subjectivity is all we can ever know.