Poetry is essential to our soul because it offers magic. It offers us another way to be besides busy.
In his essay, “Magical Thinking and Modern Times,” Poet Laureate, Baron Wormser, explains it like this:
“Something magical can happen in the poem’s precincts…
Religion consoles but poetry makes the impalpable palpable.
The door that poems open up is the door to the soul.
I mean the word in a non-doctrinal way.
I mean it as the spirit-shadow of being human,
the margin that can’t be accounted for by explanation,
that can’t be reduced or explained.
I mean it as the feeling that we are much more than a given identity.
We partake of something extraordinary in our being human.
…What is important is that there be some recognition that the magic of poetry exists and matters,
for it’s the magic that is endangered.
Young people literally perish each day for the lack of that magic.
No one has bothered to show them that there is a margin for their spirits.
The margin can’t be measured,
nor can the spirit.
For many,
if it can’t be measured,
it doesn’t exist.”
Religion consoles but poetry makes the impalpable palpable.
The door that poems open up is the door to the soul.
I mean the word in a non-doctrinal way.
I mean it as the spirit-shadow of being human,
the margin that can’t be accounted for by explanation,
that can’t be reduced or explained.
I mean it as the feeling that we are much more than a given identity.
We partake of something extraordinary in our being human.
…What is important is that there be some recognition that the magic of poetry exists and matters,
for it’s the magic that is endangered.
Young people literally perish each day for the lack of that magic.
No one has bothered to show them that there is a margin for their spirits.
The margin can’t be measured,
nor can the spirit.
For many,
if it can’t be measured,
it doesn’t exist.”
That is what poetry is to me. The constellation of words and their orbiting sounds and meanings can be incredibly inspiring and emotionally moving. But poetry does something more than what we can point to on the page. As Wormser says, it creates a margin for our spirits.
Be it in a firefly at dusk, the fluttering eyelids of a sleeping child or an abandoned bird’s nest.
Poetry helps ground us in the truth of our inner being.
Poet Christian Wiman says,
“Let us remember…
that in the end we go to poetry
for one reason,
so that we might more fully inhabit our lives
and the world in which we live them,
and that if we more fully inhabit these things,
we might be less apt to destroy both.”
“Let us remember…
that in the end we go to poetry
for one reason,
so that we might more fully inhabit our lives
and the world in which we live them,
and that if we more fully inhabit these things,
we might be less apt to destroy both.”
In a world so riddled with reasons to detach, depersonalize and deflect—inhabiting our lives seems the domain of poetry. In a sense, poetry reintroduces us to ourselves, to the part we thought we’d lost or forgotten—the part that cannot make sense of logic but is listening intently for something deeper.
Poet Carl Sandburg plays with the way poetry begins communicating before we even fully understand it, with the way it continues to ripple out and widen.
Poetry plays where imagination and reality meet.
This playfulness as poet Novalis says,
“heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”
And so,
we are able to make meaning where there had been none.
This playfulness as poet Novalis says,
“heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”
And so,
we are able to make meaning where there had been none.
Robert Penn Warren says,
“In the end, the poem is not a thing we see—
it is, rather, a light by which we may see—
and what we see is life.”
“In the end, the poem is not a thing we see—
it is, rather, a light by which we may see—
and what we see is life.”
Poetry offers us an ‘or.’
It takes a crack in the sidewalk and says look inside the fracture of your concrete façade.
It takes a crack in the sidewalk and says look inside the fracture of your concrete façade.
It is not broken.
It is a threshold from which your dandelion can grow,
and grant you in its withering way,
your wildest dreams.
and grant you in its withering way,
your wildest dreams.
