Why Poetry Matters (review)

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?” (17) Like many of her best poems, Emily Dickinson’s feeling for poetry as a kind of shock to the senses—and to sense—is at once abrupt and enquiring. Is there any other way? Jay Parini thinks so. Poetry can provide sustenance as well as shock, a way for you to keep your head as well as lose it, for “Poets articulate thoughts and feelings in ways that clarify both . . . At its best, poetry is language adequate to our experience” (8–9).

Why Poetry Matters offers itself as a timely, passionate defence of the poetic. The book ranges far and wide with chapters on poetry’s engagement with voice, metaphor, tradition, politics, religion, and the natural world. Parini moves from discussions of Horace and Longinus to comments on Frost, Stevens, and Eliot, and he has a sharp eye for the apposite quotation; the first chapter especially—on “Defending Poetry”—provides an elegant, thoughtful tour through criticisms and celebrations of poetry from Plato to Oppen. Other chapters, though, are a little more uneven. The publisher’s blurb says that the study is intended as “a primer for the general reader, students, novices and experts alike.” The book often carries the ex cathedra tone of the lecturer, but too often it has the dashed-down feel of lecture notes; Burns, we are informed, “rarely takes poetical thinking to any height” (71).

Parini inclines towards making assertions without pausing to make his case, and as a result it feels as though arguments are being both raised and avoided: “The connection between poetry and religious feeling,” for instance, “is (and always has been) deep and consistent; one could in fact argue that spiritual awareness is central to the art itself, and that all poetry aspires to the condition of scriptures. This is probably true. But let’s draw back a bit . . . ” (34). On other occasions, repetition stands in for sustained reading; the chapter on politics informs us that “[t]he question of what right poets have to speak up for anyone at all is complicated” (126). A few pages later we are reminded that the politics of poetry is “a complex subject that is easily misunderstood” (128), and then reminded again that the zone where poetry, politics, and morality converge “will necessarily be a zone of complexity and considerable nuance” (131). The problem here, though, is that “the general reader and students” are not given closely-read demonstrations of this nuance and complexity in practice. The suggestiveness of Parini’s thinking is sometimes hindered, rather than enhanced, by his desire to cover lots of ground.

T. S. Eliot’s proviso in his essay in praise of Matthew Arnold springs to mind: “he was so conscious of what, for him, poetry was for, that he could not altogether see it for what it is.”¹ Which is to say: Why Poetry Matters perhaps contains too much emphasis on poetry, and not enough on poems. When Parini commits himself to an exploration of how as well as why things matter—as he does in his excellent chapter on ‘Metaphor’—the book is richly rewarding. Generally, though, the focus is on the function of poetry at the present time, and Parini is pretty sure about what that function is. “The language of poetry can, I believe, save us” with its “still, small voice” (xiv, x). Parini, too, aims to speak with “a softly insistent voice to anyone who cares to listen: take, eat” (xv). The communion that is being offered here becomes less soft and more insistent as the book progresses. “Poetry is liturgical, however secular,” Parini explains, for “poetry provides the consolations of religion” (101): “Poetry...