I just read in The New Yorker “The Defense of Poetry. Can a Poem Change Your Life?”, by Louis Menand, in which he reviews Michael Robbin’s latest book, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music. In his article, Menand defends the role of poetry not only as an aesthetic expression directed to the poet himself, but also as an attempt to convey a message to others that can even serve as a foundational text of a nation’s identity. Such is the case of Dante’s Divine Comedy with Italy, as Menand mentions, or Homer’s Iliad with Greece, for example.

Menand gives some interesting data to support his argument: a few days after the presidential election on November 8, 2016, the Academy of American Poets and the Web site Brain Pickings organized a pop-up poetry reading that attracted hundreds of people to Washington Square Park. The Donald Trump Poetry Contest, which was announced one day after the inauguration, prompted about two thousand submissions. Menand gives these and other examples to support his argument that crisis is an opportunity for poetry.

It is true that poetry gains strength in times of emotional distress and instability, but the reasons for this go far beyond the poet’s intention to speak up. Poetry shakes the ground of fundamental beliefs more straightforwardly than prose because, in that search for words needed to convey the message, the poet tests the limits of language and reaches into the roots of human essence. Poetry’s true realm is the unconscious, a place of unawareness shared by humankind. The language of poetry is profoundly effective not despite being indirect, but because it is. Linear and straightforward communication talks to the rational part of the individual and therefore it aims to be exempt of feelings. Poetry slips, evokes and suggests and it is precisely the linguistic twist what creates the emotional dart. That is why, as Oskar Kristeller puts it, poets take the place of philosophers when these are not present in the society, which seems to be the case with the last US presidential election.

Just like art does, poetry challenges us to view the world from a different perspective. Figurative language links words with ideas in an unexpected way because it is not literal. The type of association between word and idea depends only on the poet’s mind and it may be based on analogy, likeness or just an emotion. The goal is to convey an idea and the most effective way is creating an image that contains it in itself.

Metaphors are one of those tools from everyday life that work with the unconscious. They allow us to connect with the unconscious through the analogy that is established between the real object (or idea) and the imaginary one. We deal with them everyday: we may feel up for that business or under the weather, we look down on someone, we speak up, stories passed down to us, we down a piece of cake… Mental images fill our days in the most creative ways.

A poet is a photographer of the unconscious, one could say. We certainly cannot take a picture of a feeling, but we can describe it with those words that shape a specific image, which condenses that feeling. In this sense, poetry has the capability of expressing a concept without following the logical linearity of language. Good poetry, that is.

Louis Menand, “The Defense of Poetry”, The New Yorker, July 31 (2017) 64-69.