What's the point of poetry?

In the very olden days what art did people have? Singing, dancing, painting, what else?

Poetry then was closely linked to song, and the original metres set out to create different moods.

Poetry was also affiliated to performance: reciting long verses, perhaps actors performing the speeches in a poem.

And how far did this performance differ from religious ceremony? Poetry mattered sufficiently to bring people together to experience as a group different moods.

And for a long time, even the specialisation in prose, and the popularity of the novel, couldn’t kill off poetry. Even up to the nineteenth century, popular ballads and poetry were close enough that they might sometimes be the same.

In the twentieth century poetry was knocked off its pedestal and had to compete with cinema and television (and lost), and popular music (it lost).

Look at the poetry of ‘Apocalypse Now’, it’s far more powerful than ‘The Wasteland’ by any measure.

The last century saw poetry deal with this primarily by hiding in a cave and singing to itself: in order to understand the modernists you need to be able to read ancient Greek and Latin, and have at hand an encyclopaedia, dictionary, etymology and ordinance survey map for every poem (as a minimum, if you’re an expert in spiders or rocks that helps too).

After all this effort, how many people can genuinely say they take pleasure from reading the Eliot, Pound or Joyce? Not as many as liked ‘Breaking Bad’, that’s for sure.

It’s no wonder poetry became the sport of a show off elite.

More recently poetry has swung in the other direction, and we see (thankfully) a poetry that makes sense when you hear or read it. We can also attend poetry reading events which seem popular. Whether this is a counter culture move or demonstrates a genuine human need for poetry is another matter.

But how good is the quality of this contemporary poetry? That's such a big topic, it must be left for another time.

So, if there was no poetry, if it disappeared tomorrow, would it matter?
Probably not.


About the author: Christopher Dadson is a British poet and playwright, born in Belfast, raised in Birmingham, and currently living in London, where he works full time in the charity sector and writes in his spare time.

His first and second collections (“Twenty-First Century Renderings” and "Everything is Now") are available here: https://www.austinmacauley.com/author/dadson-christopher

He’s on Instagram as DadsonC (or The Raging Poet)

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