Why Poetry?

 

John Keats.

Up into the 1960s, poetry sold better than prose fiction in Canada. Now nobody buys poetry books. What happened?

To be fair, all the other arts are also moribund. Yes, a kind of prose fiction and a kind of movie and a kind of pop music sells, but it is all entertainment, not art.

Meantime, we have seen spiraling rates of depression, homelessness, drug use, suicide.

These two trends are related.

Poetry, and the other arts, bring meaning. Man needs meaning. He does not live by bread alone. Poetry takes the brute events of life and makes them meaningful. 

Beauty is the perception of meaning.

By beauty, I do not mean mere prettiness. I mean what can produce the aesthetic experience, the OMG moment.

True beauty requires the sublime. It must convey some deep truth. 

It must also be in line with moral goodness; it must be just.

The three transcendentals are the irreducible source of all value: truth, goodness or justice, and beauty. This is what poetry, and art, expresses; and leads the reader to, like a torch held high, like a lighthouse on a hill.

The existence of each transcendental implies the other two. You can’t ever have just one. Beauty requires truth; truth is always beautiful. “Truth is beauty, beauty truth: that is all ye know, and all ye need to know.” Similarly, an injustice or evil act cannot be beautiful. 

This is what life is for. We are created to seek the transcendentals, and to create art.

In recent generations, we no longer produce or appreciate poetry because we have given up the search for truth. Worse: we are in full flight from truth. Modernism was a cry of despair, that we had lost access to truth and beauty somehow; all the old verities were gone. “The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” We kept waiting for Godot, and he did not come.

Postmodernism is something else: it is a declaration that there is no truth, no beauty, and anyone asserting such a thing should be condemned and hounded out of polite company.

This view is the death of art. It is giving up on meaning.

And suicide, drug addiction, depression, mental illness, and a war of all against all are the inevitable consequence. If there is no meaning, everyone just grabs what they want for the moment.

This is why I write: to try to shine a beacon through this wasteland of relativism and despair. To set off a flare.