What Is Poetry For? (A Preface)

As the “free world” teeters on the brink of fascism, it may seem necessary to offer some apology for even asking this question. Why bother? But having asked that much, we are practically underway and may as well continue. We are already asking what poetry is for.

This question raises expectations that poetry will turn out to serve some purpose. Perhaps it somehow keeps us safe, or it supports some form of social progress, or it de-naturalizes harmful power structures. We might encourage ourselves in this expectation by pointing to particular poems that support such outcomes. The Robert Frost poem “The Onset” gives consolation in times of trouble, reminding the reader that just as “winter death has never tried the earth but it has failed,” so privation and despair never ultimately prevail.

But in the same collection of Frost’s poetry, we find a more celebrated poem, “For Once, Then, Something,” which raises a problem so idiosyncratic that it’s hard to identify with: “Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs always wrong to the light.” Okay, Robert. Tell us more. And the solution to this problem is whimsically ephemeral: one time, our boy did get a glimpse of… well, he can’t even say what it was: “Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.” What is a poem like that for?

Or to put a finer point on it, we can turn to what must be the epitome of triviality in poetry, William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow”:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

I find it hard not to like this poem, and judging by how widely anthologized it is, I am not alone, but if you go looking in it for answers to any of your problems, you will come away empty-handed (and perhaps a bit frustrated, if your first encounter with the poem happens to be in a classroom with a bunch of people struggling to have ideas about it).

So let’s assume that you’re not satisfied with the easy answers to the question of what poetry is for. Sure, some poems console, or inspire action, or counsel with practical wisdom. Some poems, that is, change the world in a way that seems to leave no room for the question of what they are for, because what these poems are for is obvious. But many great poems do no such thing.

Let’s assume that poetry is still poetry even if it has no immediate sequel in social, political, or ethical action. The question in these cases arises more pressingly: what is poetry even for? 

The question can better be answered if we begin by paraphrasing it. Instead of asking “What is poetry for?” we can ask “What is the place of poetry?” 

This paraphrase accomplishes two things. First, we remove poetry from the context of functional definition. If we stick to asking what comes of poetry, what consequences it has that benefit us, we presuppose the answer in the negative: poetry has no purpose. 

We can return to the original question only when we have extracted ourselves from limiting presuppositions about what matters. We tend to expect that mattering means “adding value.” Something is added to life, something that can be recognized as an unequivocal good. But a poet is not in the mood to do you some good when they write a poem. They are in the mood to write a poem, and we dishonor that mood if we demand that it be straightforwardly beneficial.

When we ask about the “place of poetry” instead of poetry’s function, instead of trying to identify a lack or deficiency that is corrected by poetry, we are trying to identify poetry’s domain of authority.

Second, our paraphrase of the question gives us a directional clue to the answer. If poetry has a “place,” then we can ask where that place is. Where do you go when you are transported by poetry? Where does the poet go when inspired? From whence does poetry come to us?

You can say that this is just a metaphor, if you like, if that makes you worry less that we’ll find ourselves donning adventuring gear and setting out on an expedition to find the Lost Woods of Arcady. But what do you mean by calling it “just a metaphor”? Presumably, you mean that this place is not really a place, but is somehow “in your head.”

Of course, you will have to add that this, too, is just a metaphor. I cannot find the place of poetry by cracking open Joanna Newsom’s skull and digging around in her gray matter, any more than I can get there by following a map. 

Fair enough. But this “inside-ness” is a foundational metaphor, spatial language we use every day to talk about the non-spatiality of the mind. One can “look within for the answer,” or argue that “it’s what’s inside that counts,” or come to be “lost in thought.” We are so comfortable with the idea that each of us has an “inside,” a place of thought and feeling, that we hardly question it.

To interrogate the reality of the “place of poetry,” then, we have to question the reality of our own interiority. If poetry does not literally have a place, then neither does my thought and feeling. Not in my brain, not in my gut, not in my heart. If we are willing to risk that move and bear the resulting disorientation, we will find ourselves no-place, which is where our journey to the place of poetry must begin.

If this sounds nihilistic, that’s because nihilism is the condition for the possibility of this entire discussion. The question of poetry’s place, insofar as it expresses a suspicion that poetry may not have one, emerges from a general nihilistic trend in modern history. Nihilism has taught you already that the moon is not a god, it is “just” a floating rock; that the wind is not a voice from beyond, it is “just” a byproduct of colliding atmospheric pressures; that you yourself are not special, you are “just” an arrangement of particles. It should not be surprising if nihilism also teaches that poetry is “just poetry.”

The distinction to which we have appealed several times now, between the literal and the metaphorical, is a mainstay of this nihilating tendency. I will have more to say later about non-nihilistic possibilities for the concept of metaphor, but for now, we meet this concept working in the service of reduction and disenchantment, the metaphysical process that steals from us the world and our being at home in it. We assign the concept “metaphor” to whatever is fanciful, playful, or otherwise unsuited to the nowheresville of nihilism.

If we are asking about the place of poetry, we first have to admit that we who ask this question are already nihilists and that we routinely use the distinction between the literal and metaphorical to shore up our own nihilism. If we were not nihilists, then poetry would be the air we breathe, and we would no more wonder it at it than we wonder what our own bodies are for.

If it helps, you can picture yourself as a nihilist opening a window in their own mind to see what’s outside. That’s what I hope we’ll be doing here.

But that’s just a metaphor of course! The point is that you don’t have to be terrified of your own nihilism because it isn’t impenetrable. You’re still living your life, aren’t you? After all, you’re over a thousand words into a strange little essay on poetry, and you haven’t given up on it yet. That’s not just fear of facing the void. You like poetry. So you already have, as the fellow said, “a casement ope at night, to let the warm Love in!”

On the other hand, I can’t promise you that this is safe. I myself am not certain of the outcome. But we have to see how deep the cellar goes before we can climb out. Ask Dante. Unlike him, however, you have a guide who is as lost as you are. I can’t say whether poetry really has a place, or whether that’s just something I like to say because it makes me feel good. So it is not with the certainty of one who has long dwelled there, but with the fanciful hope of one who has dreamed of it, that I propose to you what I seem to have found when I look through the little window in my own mind: that not only is the place of poetry not “metaphorical,” but what we now call the “literal” world is an ephemeral construct, and that the place of poetry is the actual world itself. We will have to see together whether that is not too grand a thesis.