This is an interesting question, not least because it simply would not have been asked a hundred years ago. It would have been obvious to most literate people that reading poetry was a worthwhile occupation. Poems and poets were valued: Byron was a bestseller in the Romantic period; Tennyson a Victorian celebrity. But now even winners of poetry’s most prestigious awards may sell only a few hundred copies of their prize-winning work. Something has clearly happened to make general attitudes towards reading poetry different from those that existed in earlier times. So why should we still read poetry now?
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I would offer three main reasons. First, what we might broadly call the poetic mode of apprehending the world is fundamental to our common humanity. Poets have always known this, but the dominance of more scientifically based worldviews has made it less obvious in the modern world. Recent research has made the importance of poetic modes of thinking clearer, though. In the 1970s, Lakoff and Johnson’s groundbreaking work, Metaphors We Live By, showed how metaphorical ways of construing the world permeate all kinds of understanding and response, including the most functional and scientific. Poetry as an art form is just the most highly developed orchestration of the various modes of lateral thinking that are integral to human consciousness. These help us make connections, rather than see the world as atomised and detached from us.
People exercise and go to gyms to make their bodies supple and strong enough to cope with life’s physical demands; poetry might be conceived as a kind of linguistic gymnasium, stretching and building our capacity for language...
Poetry is more developed than ordinary ways of linking through metaphor, though, because it is language at its most resourceful. People exercise and go to gyms to make their bodies supple and strong enough to cope with life’s physical demands; poetry might be conceived as a kind of linguistic gymnasium, stretching and building our capacity for language (and thus also for thought) to cope with life’s mental demands. Moreover, poetry’s distinctive rhythms, rhymes and images help it stay in our minds for longer than ordinary language. Hence, W.H.Auden called poetry ‘memorable speech’. Our recent Poetry and Memory Project showed that for many people poetry continues to be an immensely important resource, both for their inner lives and as a personal touchstone within a shared culture.
Finally, we should keep reading poetry because it can enable us to access, identify and articulate deep feelings. Its structures can contain us and help us to bear the unbearable – which is why, at moments of heightened emotion, such as weddings and funerals, only a poem will do. When the staunch atheist, Philip Larkin, wrote about church as a ‘serious place’, he was thinking about poetry as much as churches. Poetry can be funny and provocative but it is also the most spiritual of all the arts, alongside music, to which it is closely related. We need to keep reading it because - in a rapidly changing, largely secular age - it is a space that we can grow wise in. It gives, as Shakespeare recognised, a ‘local habitation and a name’ to what would otherwise be beyond apprehension.
See more information here: www.poetryandmemory.com