Why We Need Poetry: Seeing the World Anew

It’s the poet’s vocation to see the world’s beauty and mystery.

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

[This article originally appeared on The Epoch Times.]

Great damage has been done by a false perception of poetry as something elitist, inaccessible, academic, and esoteric. Poetry is for everyone, for the so-called “common man,” not the scholar. Poetry is a magnifying glass through which we view the grass beneath our feet and a telescope through which we view the stars above our heads. Poetry sharpens the vision so we can penetrate to the wonder of the real, which we are often blind to.

As literature professor John Senior is cited in “John Senior and the Restoration of Realism” by Fr. Bethel, “The poet is the man who says ‘Look! Look! You never saw that before.’ And if you follow him, you will see much more than you would have seen by yourself. In doing so, you have enlarged your capacity to experience the world, which is another way of saying to live.”

This is the poet’s vocation: to see what’s really there, in its beauty and mystery, and help others see, too, so that they may live more fully.

Why do we need the poet’s help to see? There are many answers to that question, but one of the most important is the old adage, “Familiarity breeds contempt.” Frequent encounters with everyday realities—stunning though they may be—tend to deaden our perception of them. We fall into a routine. We look but we do not see, anymore.

Poetic Miracles

The Renaissance poet and clergyman John Donne explained the idea of our deadened senses in connection with the marvels of the natural world. “There is nothing that God hath established in a constant course of nature, and which therefore is done every day, but would seem a Miracle, and exercise our admiration, if it were done but once,” he observed in an Easter sermon in 1627. Imagine if rain had never fallen, and then one day the heavens opened up. Great crowds would amass in the streets, stunned, turning their glistening faces to the sky in ecstasy. How could water fall from above?

It’s the same with human relationships. Consider the miracle of having a child. When you first hold the newborn in your arms, you feel a whole new set of nerves leap to life within you, new channels within your heart. You see the child for the miracle that he or she is. But years pass, the child grows, and this initial impression fades—until one of those rare moments when your child’s eye catches yours, their hair shimmers in just that way in the afternoon sunlight, their golden limbs shine, and you see, again, what you saw before; you know, again, what you knew before. The miracle has not disappeared—in fact, it has grown. You had simply forgotten until that moment.

A Poetry Case Study

Poetry makes such moments more frequent. In his poem, “Those Winter Sundays,” poet Robert Hayden dispels the mist between us and the gift of fathers and fatherhood.

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

One cannot read that poem without thinking of one’s own father, and all he has done (and perhaps one’s ingratitude for it). And, too, little ordinary things like cracked hands and fires and old shoes take on a deeper significance after reading the poem.

We can compare a poem to a camera or a mirror positioned in an unusual place. It provides a new angle on the same familiar object, so that it becomes new and strange again. “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar,” writes Romantic poet Percy Shelley in “A Defence of Poetry.” By shifting the angle on the subject, the poet reveals its essence. After encountering a great work of art, it’s not that the things of the world have changed, but our depth of understanding of them has.

The artist uses his power of vision to show us what we have seen a thousand times before as though it were for the first time—with all the accompanying thrill and wonder. This is why we need poetry. The person who is never refreshed by art runs the risk of missing so much, perhaps missing it all. What is life if we do not really see, if we are blinded by business and routine?

As Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote: “Generations have trod, have trod, have trod/ And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil/ And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil/ Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.” The daily grind sometimes makes humanity oblivious to the radiance in the everyday.

But Hopkins continues: “And for all this, nature is never spent/ There lives the dearest freshness deep down things/ And though the last lights off the black West went/ Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—”

There is us, and there is the world. The world is luminous. It is our eyes that, at times, are darkened, fatigued, half-closed in sleep. Until someone—a poet—wakes us.