The globe appears to be on a nuclear knife-edge, with world leaders declaiming and fulminating like characters from Lewis Carroll’s 19th century absurdist masterpiece The Hunting of the Snark. In any case, for me write about poetry under these circumstances might seem a bit…off. In the face of a first and final flowering of ICBM launches, what do Wordsworth’s daffodils or Rumi’s singing reed count for? The ashes of incinerated pages, perhaps.
Even in the best of times, releasing a book of poetry is like “dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting for an echo,” as the late poet and newspaper columnist Don Marquis observed. Thankfully, I’m not about to drop something that involved into anything that cavernous. This is just a two-part thing on Substack. I need a break from my usual topics, and I suspect some of my subscribers do too.
My question is this: can poetry actually change a person or a planet for the better, in its own fugitive, hard-to-quantify way?
Unlike journalism, old poems have a way of staying fresh. That old college standby, W.B. Yeats’ short 1919 poem The Second Coming, gets trotted out every once and a while owing to its lasting relevance. With its mysterious imagery of “some rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem,” it conjures up a terrible circumstance vectoring in on the birthplace of Christ. It also offers the most concise description of collective cynicism ever penned, perfect for our age of neutered progressivism: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”
As a playwright, Yeats managed a living from word-herding, but he was a rare bird. According to one estimate, a Canadian author who succeeds in sellilng over 700 volumes of verse can be considered a successful poet. Clearly, rhyme doesn’t pay. T.S. Eliot kept his day job at the bank, Wallace Stevens sold insurance, and Ogden Nash once observed, “Poets aren’t very useful/Because they aren’t consumeful or very produceful.”
We tend to think of poets as quaint figures wandering lonely as a cloud from humdrum day jobs to the open mike. Their efforts hardly seem world-changing or life altering, although we give grudging respect to a few dead, white versifiers (mostly Shakespeare and a few romantic poets). Yet poetry definitely has a capacity for transformation.
Personally, I can’t exactly say poetry changed my life, but there was a time when it definitely helped me cope. At the turn of the millennium, I fell into a deep depression that lasted about a year. During this purgatorial period, the opening passage from Dante’s Inferno became a touchstone for me.
It begins, “midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straight forward pathway had been lost.”
I would often listen to an album by singer Marianne Faithfull that opened with this recitation of Dante and ended with lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I found a sense of solace hearing her ravaged voice recite these verses, knowing my suffering was not unique to me. Although I had little interest in the company of others at the time, and even less in my own, I felt less alone absorbing this recitation of mythically charged words.
Like many others, I had admired a few well-known poems from my college days, sort of the way you admire antiques behind glass. But these words from Dante and Shakespeare via a former Mick Jagger girlfriend were like a salve applied to a wound. I believe I crawled out of this depression partly with the help of words other than my own, which came without a doctor’s prescription or adverse side effects.
British novelist Jeanette Winterson tells of a similar effect from a single line of poetry she read when she was 16 years old. She was in a library looking for a book for her adoptive mother, who was a fan of murder mysteries, and selected T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral.
“So I opened it and discovered it was written in verse,” she told Eleanor Wachtel on the CBC Radio series, Writers & Company. “ The first thing I read was a line in it where Eliot says ‘This is one moment, but know that another will pierce you with a sudden painful joy.’ And it made me cry because I was having a terrible time. I had fallen in love with a girl… It was like a message in a bottle… I didn’t know who this T. S. Eliot person was… It seemed a powerful message to me and something I could hold on to.”
This was Winterson’s beginning as a writer.
In the beginning was the word, according to Genesis. To the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece, the “Logos” – a word connoting language, speech or reason – was the divine animating principle that pervaded the universe. The Roman poet Lucretius had a slightly different idea. In his long poem, On the Nature of Things, he rejected the idea of a universe controlled by gods and proposed instead that matter is made up of tiny particles in constant motion, colliding and combining to weave the world around us.
Amazingly, atomic theory originated from the most unlikely source: a ream of verse by an ancient poet.
Lucretius was widely read after his rediscovery during the Renaissance. His ideas were foundational to the clockwork universe of classical physics, which appeared inviolable until the 20th century, when Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg smashed it open to reveal inside the cuckoo bird of quantum physics.
It wasn’t the first time poets preceded the scientists. The romantic poets of the 19th century didn’t just reject determinism; they also rejected the utilitarian viewpoint of human beings as replaceable factory widgets. In the late 1800s, Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Blake were among the first to write tracts against social injustice, with the latter poetically slamming child labour and the “satanic mills” of the industrial revolution.
“Poetry is tremendously influential,” notes British moral philosopher Mary Midgley in an interview in The Guardian. “…some scientist dismissed Shelley as a beautiful but ineffectual angel standing in the void in vain or something, but, in fact, that revolutionary stuff was enormously influential. His conception of society and how it required equality and how bad it was, and his kind of atheism were very impressive stuff.”
“Writers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” Shelley insisted. To put it another way, scribblers are sensitive seismographic instruments. They anticipate seismic social trends long before journalists, politicians and policy makers feel a tremor. But for their part, political leaders have often appealed to poetry to give mythic power to their initiatives. The opening lines of the American Declaration of Independence are written in iambic pentameter:
We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That all men are created equal,
That they are endowed by their Creator
with certain inalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness.
Like the atoms that vibrate unseen beneath the fabric of our lives, poetry lurks beneath the cold, functional prose of a technological society. “Language is fossil poetry,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1844. “As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”
More in Part 2.
You're speaking my language...thanks for those M Faithfull clips; I had not heard them before. Poetry is perhaps the only language that can do justice to a time like this...