Seeing Beyond

This being poetry month, it’s hard, try as I might, not to think about Shelley. He is not my favorite poet. In fact, in high school the only grade I got less than an A came from an English Teacher who adored him, and who reacted quite negatively when I poked fun at the line in Ode to a Nightingale, “Bird thou never wert.” I called it the worst line of poetry in the English language, and her forbearance snapped. But Shelley was far better at explaining poetry than, in my regard, he was at writing it. His essay, “A Defence of Poetry”, which I highly admire, is the work which best gets at the essence of what poetry is all about.

In his essay, Shelley contrasts poetry with philosophy and poets with philosophers. Specifically, as a kind of tongue-in-cheek Irony, he finds Homer a better philosopher than Plato. It is Shelley's reasoning that gets to the heart of things. He sees that both philosophers and poets seek to find and express the transcendent. But while philosophers seek the transcendent “beyond”, for Plato in a world of Ideals, poets find it in the ordinary. Whitman was speaking to that in titling his work, "Leaves of Grass." You can see explicit expressions of it on my Poetry by Others page in Mark Doty’s poem, “A Green Crab’s Shell” or in Eamon Grennan’s poem, “Wing Road.”

Shelley’s insight goes beyond poetry. A trivial example was on view last night at the NCAA Basketball Championship when a tame eagle was released during the National Anthem, flopped around a bit and settled on his trainer’s shoulder. It was a kind of performance doggerel, illustrating our need, successful or not, to see something “beyond”.  Silly or not, it temporarily elevated vision beyond the event itself. We need that sense of beyond to counter the grinding down we encounter each day from the world around us, and both poetry and religion, in different ways, provide it.  Else we fall prey to seeing all those around us as simply complex heaps of dirt. Seeing only the dirt, we miss what Joseph Campbell called, “the light within the light bulb.” And that kind of devaluation of others is the underlying cause of many of the problems of the world.

That is reason enough to celebrate poetry – that it contributes to making the world a better place. Can you think of any great villain who was also a great poet? One famous critic’s definition of a good poem was that it is “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Argentina has found that music, so closely related to poetry, has, as a standard course in school, made the school a calmer place and reduced teenage violence. Who knows what a poetry course might do? But of course, one doesn't write either poetry or music just to achieve a social purpose. A good poem is an end in itself. Write one, and see.