I have been reflecting of late on two quotes recorded in one of my notebooks. While each is about poetry and its purpose, at first glance they appear to offer opposing views of the art.
Let me get them up in front of us. The first is by William Wordsworth from his “Observations Prefixed to Lyrical Ballads” (1800):
The purpose of poetry is to give pleasure, specifically, to leave the reader with a sense of delight and satisfaction, that his time reading has repaid him with a general sense of pleasure more than some new insight or understanding of the world (which is the work of science). Poetry’s purpose is best achieved by focusing on familiar, everyday objects and situations, recounted in the ordinary language of people, suspended within a framework of meter and rhyme, and embellished or adorned with images and metaphors easily grasped and understandable.
The second is from Robin Shelton, The Poet’s Calling (1975):
Poetry synthesizes: It brings past and present together; it attempts, finally, an over-all view of the human condition, and those who are bent upon serving Poetry to the utmost will pursue both their casual and systematic “collecting”, their watchful browsings and serious studies, in such a way that they can furnish their memory banks with sufficient capital to feel equal to investing in an epic, a long philosophical poem or poem-sequence of real intellectual substance.
Wordsworth believed poetry can be useful when it brings pleasure. Shelton’s sense of poetry’s usefulness relates to its ability to grasp the totality of things. Wordsworth was inspired by attention to everyday things. Shelton believes the poet must bring past and present, daily gatherings and formal studies together. As we might expect, Wordsworth saw the need for various poetic devices to heighten the sense of pleasure. Shelton’s view depends more on the power of a poem’s focus and scope. The one is more affective and spontaneous, the other more studied and cerebral. The one aims for pleasure, delight, and satisfaction; the other for ideas, some of which may be troubling or upsetting.
Who’s right? Who best understands what poetry can do, what its best use might be?
My love for poetry—both reading and writing it—insists that they’re both right. And yet each of their views is incomplete, and incomplete even when taken together.
But a larger hurdle faces us as we consider a resolution of these two views. For most readers today, poetry is the least useful of all literary forms. Back at the end of the previous century, Dana Gioia raised the important question, Can Poetry Matter? He insisted it could and then invested the next several years of his life demonstrating that it does. And while some progress was realized for the state of poetry by the various efforts Gioia made as head of the National Endowment of the Arts, the state of poetry today remains largely what it was at the end of the last century. Unuseful and unused.
Poetry, for perhaps most people, including most of those who read, is useless. It does not delight them and—especially modern verse—is just too hard to understand. We might be tempted to agree, and so the effort herein essayed is pointless.
But think of what such folks are missing in the delight poetry can deliver: amusement, surprise, happiness, fun, closure, identification, even thrill, as well as the strange delight that comes from experiencing such affections as sadness, loss, or fear. And the beauty of such delights which come from reading poetry can be experienced over and over and, when shared, are heightened in their experience.
Or consider the dramatic and even transforming ideas that poetry has offered over the years: insight to our world and ourselves, new ways of thinking about life, enriched possibilities, defining paradigms, even to justifying the ways of God with men.
All that seems very useful to me.
Still, for most readers, like the disappointed folk of Mudville, there is no joy in poetry. With them, poetry is a consistent strikeout. Passing on verse is no more consequential than diners who refuse to take a serving of eggplant Parmesan from the buffet (and who can blame them?).
But I want to insist that poetry has use, a use that should get the attention at least of every Christian. And while that use can involve both delight and momentary frisson, or permanently broadened horizons of intellectual challenge, yet the larger use of poetry is much, much more important and rewarding.
Poetry can be a reliable passage into the joy of the Lord.
And it does this by giving delight and stretching our minds, and beyond that, by pointing us to transcendent realities and granting us glimpses of glory. Poetry can be a reliable guide for leading us into the pleasure and joy of God. Not all poetry, and not every poem alike. But as a discipline—as the Book of Psalms demonstrates—poetry is useful in tuning our hearts to the Creator and enriching our vision of ourselves and our world.
It’s not too bold to say that God thinks poetry is useful, and that being the case, we His creatures and servants should give more attention to it.
In his seminal primer on hermeneutics, On Christian Doctrine, Augustine (354-430) offered a preliminary consideration of the use of things. He wrote, “There are some things, then, which are to be enjoyed, others which are to be used, others still which [we] enjoy and use. Those things which are objects of enjoyment make us happy. Those things which are objects of use assist, and (so to speak) support us in our efforts after happiness, so that we can attain the things that make us happy and rest in them” (3.3).
With respect to our question about the use of poetry, Augustine might well endorse the views of both Wordsworth and Shelton. If it makes us happy to have a momentary delight from a poetic device or rendering, then we may use that poetry. If it delights us to think bigger, grander, thoughts about the totality of things, and if poems can enrich that experience, then we may use them to do so.
But Augustine puts up a caveat against resting our delight or intellectual satisfaction on earthly things. There are, after all, improper and unlawful delights of various kinds: “For to enjoy a thing is to rest with satisfaction in it for its own sake. To use, on the other hand, is to employ whatever means are at one’s disposal to obtain what one desires, if it is a proper object of desire; for an unlawful use ought rather to be called an abuse” (4.4). As he goes on to say, enjoying any material pleasure or thing for its own sake is idolatry.
Like Augustine’s our age is in flight from God, and we have lost sight of both proper delight and use, seeking joy in created things of various sorts and using what’s at hand, including (for some of us) verse, to obtain whatever fleeting joys we can: “We have wandered far from God; and if we wish to return to our Father’s home, this world must be used, not enjoyed, that so the invisible things of God may be clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made,—that is, that by means of what is material and temporary we may lay hold upon that which is spiritual and eternal” (4.4).
Only God is to be enjoyed for His own sake. All other created things are means to tap into that joy and to experience the unfailing pleasure that awaits us there: “The true objects of enjoyment, then, are the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, who are at the same time the Trinity, one Being, supreme above all, and common to all who enjoy Him” (5.5).
Poetry is put to its best use when, as in the Psalms, it turns our thoughts, longings, hopes, delight, and vision of the world to the Triune God, exalted in glory. For there is nothing greater in which to delight and nothing vaster in terms of the scope of His Being or understanding than God. When we have studied a poem with a view to enjoying God, we will find that all kinds of poems can connect us to the enjoyment of His Presence. But we must look through the poems to the One Who makes all poets, and all who believe in Him, His own ποίημα (Eph. 2:10), with an inbuilt capacity to know Him by every created thing.
Every poem thus has iconic potential. It can be a “window” into some greater understanding, awareness, or experience of God. But we will have to read many poems to discover which of them does that, as Abram Van Engen argues in Word Made Fresh. And we must train our skills of attention and perception by applying ourselves more diligently to the revelation of God in Scripture and in creation. All the revelation of God is more than what it first appears. The Scriptures are not merely histories, poems, and doctrines; and the creation is more than merely trees, a well-made cabinet, a carefully planted row, or a dear friend. All the revelation of God is like a stereogram, a Magic Eye picture. We know what’s in there, what to look for: all the revelation of God is subsumed in Jesus. We’re looking to see Jesus. To see Him in every verse of Scripture and in every facet and thing of creation. But we must train ourselves unto this end, and poetry can be a useful aid for showing us Jesus in both Scripture and creation.
I offer as an example of poetry’s use in pointing us to our Source, Wendell Berry’s untitled “Sabbath Poem” from 1979:
To sit and look at light-filled leaves
May let us see, or seem to see,
Far backward as through clearer eyes
To what unsighted hope believes:
That blessed conviviality
That sang Creation’s seventh sunrise,
Time when the Maker’s radiant sight
Made radiant every thing He saw,
And every thing He saw was filled
With perfect joy and life and light.
His perfect pleasure was sole law;
No pleasure had become self-willed.
For all His creatures were His pleasures
And their whole pleasure was to be
What He made them; they sought no gain
Or growth beyond their proper measures,
Nor longed for change or novelty.
The only new thing could be pain.
To see into “That blessed conviviality” of the divine Trinity, to bask in God’s light and pleasure, to know our “proper measure” in Him—here we have a resource for repeated reading and contemplation to delight us in our blessed Creator and Redeemer. But, as we learn from Scripture, by our sin, we introduce the pain that was absent on the seventh sunrise, leading to lostness and the savaging of creation; yet Christ gathers all our pain into Himself on the cross for our redemption and that of the world.
Here is a poem that both gives delight and stretches our view of the totality of things. And yet its greatest use supersedes both these purposes by evoking the Divine Presence in the poem itself and its powerful evocation of the work of Christ. Read and savor this poem. Share it with a friend. Memorize it, and you will never look at a tree the same way again.
Nor ever forget what it cost the Triune God, and Jesus Christ our Savior, to put pain to death and hold out to us the promise of “Creation’s seventh sunrise” all over again. When we use poetry this way, all the delight and insight, and vision of verse can be a passage into the joy of the Lord, which is our highest happiness and our reason for being.
Image Credit: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, “Bouquet of Violets in a Vase” (1882) via Wikimedia.
