In the Western tradition, the history of poetry might be said to be a history of defending its presence. From the ancient Classical writers Plato, Aristotle and Horace through to recent writers such as Ben Lerner (in The Hatred of Poetry), the topic of poetry is often couched in response to a broader sense that poetry is somehow socially problematic, or at least unpopular. Plato’s concern that poetry by Homer and others may ‘render the nerves of our guardians […] too excitable and too effeminate’ originates a longstanding sense that poetry is dangerously irrational, that it appeals not to the intellectual faculties, but to the emotions, and the body. For this reason, [Plato concludes], his hypothetical, ideal society cannot tolerate any poetry beyond ‘hymns to the gods’ and ‘praises of famous men’: ‘For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State’; poetry, for Plato, challenges the authority of law and reason. The only way it can be re-admitted to his Republic is if its defenders can ‘show not only that she is pleasant but also useful to States and to human life […] for if this can be proved we shall surely be the gainers—I mean, if there is a use in poetry as well as a delight?’.

Plato’s formulations thus establish poetry first as an art that appeals to the nerves, the emotions, the body, and second one that must be valued in terms of service. Despite these emerging by way of Plato’s rejection, he nevertheless thereby attaches potency to poetry’s nature and effects. Indeed, Plato’s writings have generated rather than foreclosed valuations of poetry: innumerable writers have sought to define the special quality of poetry and to articulate its relationship to aesthetics (engagement with beauty) and thereby ethics, morality and social relations. Of course, it is significant that such an enterprise is entered into at all – the fact that writers seek to defend poetry and/or poetic effects in ways that we don’t see in relation to prose indicates its peculiar status in cultural and social regard, and Plato’s provocations set the terms for the long history of poetics, including our current period’s debates around instrumental attitudes towards culture in capitalist societies. (Very often ‘the Arts’ are asked to defend themselves in terms of what ‘benefit’ – usually now economic – they can say they bring to society.) Poetry’s defenders must answer to usefulness. 

For Plato, usefulness attaches to clarity, rationality and virtue – and, by effect, to perpetuation of the order of power. But usefulness can be seen in radically different terms – for someone like Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), poetry’s usefulness lies precisely in its capacity to reimagine the social contract, to see things differently. Shelley famously declared that poets are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ (p. 613), attributing incredible significance to the creative faculties as an instrumental part of how we experience – and might reimagine – social life. Shelley attributed this power to poetry’s capacity to ‘reproduc[e] the common universe of which we are portions and percipients’ and to ‘purg[e] from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures us from the wonder of our being’ (p. 611): i.e. poetry imaginatively creates the common world we inhabit in such a way as to reveal to us buried connections, and striking beauties. It thereby does the work of sharpening our perception to the true condition of our selves and our world: it is political, moral, ethical. In his treatise Shelley doesn’t give specific rules for what counts as ‘poetic’, or what a poem should look or sound like; rather, poetry for him is an energising spirit (he even names it ‘divine’), a force of understanding that channels through the poet figure (a prophet of perception rather than a soothsayer) to reveal a counterforce to mechanical and material gains that, without poetry, serve only to perpetuate inequality and slavery: ‘We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life’ (p. 608). 

Shelley is by no means alone in asserting poetry as a kind of counterforce, an oppositional index of value that counterweighs technocratic impulses in common life – he was drawing on many treatises that offer different angles on this perspective (at the time he was answering his friend Thomas Peacock’s somewhat playful declaration that poetry would become obsolete in an age of scientific discovery) and many others have since engaged comparable ideas about poetry as a fierce force of revelation and revolution. Indeed, the poetics that Shelley came to represent to some – male, Western, idealist – have been critiqued via these very terms too. We may see Audre Lorde (1934-1992), for example, as a brilliantly intuitive interlocutor with Shelley’s model of poetry, and through her see poetry not as a fancy arrangement of words but as an energy that upends all manner of discriminatory hierarchies: ‘I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean – in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight’ (p. 8). Poetry, for Lorde, is a way of arming and strengthening oneself (and one’s community) through imaginative realisation to be brave enough to generate change: ‘Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems […] We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it’ (p. 9). 

Implicit – and often explicit – in what Lorde writes is a connection between poetry and the body, a defiant callback to Plato’s fear that poetry appeals to the nerves (the physiological, the bodily). The mechanics of this connection are intriguingly written into the vocabularies we use to talk about formal poetry – the metrical ‘feet’, a ‘body’ of verse, a poet’s ‘corpus’ [complete writings] – but the precise relationship between bodies and poetry is elusive and therefore available to the abundance of theories that have explored the status of the body. Writers such as Alice Notley (b. 1945) take up the call of poetry as rebellious or revolutionary precisely to disobey what she sees as poetic tradition’s repression of the displayed body (‘It’s necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against...everything’: ‘it seemed one had to disobey the past and the practices of literary males in order to talk about what was going on most literarily around one, the pregnant body, and babies for example. […] it seems as if one must disobey everyone else in order to see at all. This is a persistent feeling in a poet but staying alert to all the ways one is coerced into denying experience, sense and reason is a huge task’. And yet bodies, and bodily feeling, sneak into poetry all the time – even a figure such as Matthew Arnold – a Victorian ‘guardian of culture’, thought of as austere and rational – is often weeping in his poems, and found even just the way that poetry arranges words could catch his breath: in front of ‘Chaucer’s divine liquidness of diction, his divine fluidity of movement’, for Arnold ‘it is difficult to speak temperately’. Through its appeal to rhythm and pulse, reaching out to one’s speech and breath, poetry always intimates the body through form, even if that is an occluded presence that haunts a poem’s more leading semantic drive. If so, then poetry’s oppositional force simultaneously disrupts both the realm of ideas and the social pressure to police the body, repress it, and all its functions including sexuality, emotion and reproduction: poetry stands as an especially fecund strain of ‘alternative thinking’. 

Having read this sketch of some of the ways in which poetry has been theorised in toto as a category of communication with peculiar power and significance – poetics – you might now like to explore the following ‘think pieces’ that touch on theory and the key elements that actually make a poem ‘happen’: the poet, the language, the reader.

To find out more about the extraordinary range of ways in which poetry has been conceived – which reach far beyond what I have sketched here – a good place to start is with the great selection of ‘statements’ on poetry that The Poetry Foundation has gathered on its website.