The Power of Poetry

Key Points

• Poetry speaks to us at intense moments in life.

• Poetry and metaphor offer a way of expressing what is so often difficult to put into words.

• Poetry offers a way of expressing and confronting grief.

In his fascinating memoir of reading, Curiosity, the author Alberto Manguel recalls sitting down one evening to pen a letter. As he was about to write the words, he felt as though they were escaping him—‘rebelled’, as he puts it—vanishing before he had time to arrange them into any meaningful order [1]. He was surprised but not unduly concerned, putting his word-finding difficulties down to fatigue. But even after he redoubled his efforts to retrieve them, the words still refused to come. When he went to tell his partner that something was wrong, he found that his speech was similarly affected: ‘I was unable to mouth the words, except in a painfully protracted stutter’. A short while later he was in casualty, being treated for a stroke.

In order to satisfy himself that he had not lost his ability to recall words, only that of producing them, Manguel began to reel off in his head stretches of literature he knew by heart. What came forth most fluently (almost effortlessly) was poetry—great stretches of it—and in no time at all his mind was filled with the reassuring rhythms and rhymes of Edgar Allan Poe, Dante and Victor Hugo. . .

Soon after this self-recital Manguel began to recover more of his linguistic abilities. Within a few hours, he was able to write again, and then, over the course of the following 4 or 5 weeks, his speech returned, free of all impediments bar a very slight stammer.

Manguel’s experience demonstrates what I have always felt about poetry—that it resonates and endures more than any other form of linguistic expression. To know poetry by heart is not only to know it word for word but also to possess it entirely (in the way that we can never possess a piece of visual art or a musical score). When you know a poem by heart, it has become part of you—you can summon it at will, recite it silently to yourself or recite it to others. Poems learned by rote—especially those encountered in our formative years—tend to stay with us all through our lives, whatever our age or cognitive limits.

Although literary critics sometimes dispute the definition of poetry (is poetic prose poetry? Is a prose poem prose?), most people know a poem when they see one. And most people not only recognise poetry when they see it, but they also have a sense of how to write it, however basic or whatever the quality. Those who feel compelled to versify know that poetry, unlike other forms of language, speaks to us at pivotal moments in our lives. For poetry, as Andrew Motion eloquently puts it:

is the form we turn to instinctively at moments of intensity, whether it be to celebrate or grieve. Why? Because of its compressions and distillations, its different perspectives, its meditative pace. Because of its link with our strongest emotions. Because of its power to console. Because of its separation (of whatever degree) from ordinary speech, which creates a sense of occasion. Because of its implicit demand to remember [2].

Poetry has much in common with music and in many ways produces similar restorative and quickening effects in listeners. Both art forms exploit recurring accents and patterns, sounds arranged in and through time. But though musical in various respects, poetry, as David Constantine reminds us, is never music [3]. Poetry is a blend of sound and sense, capturing thought and experience in the rhythm and emphasis of words. Poetry is charged language—it has, as Katrin Gerber et al. put it in their rather wonderful paper on poetry in grief (this issue), the potential to make readers and listeners ‘feel the impact of the experience that is being described’ [4]. Poetry, in short, connects us to the world.

In their study, Gerber et al. skilfully craft poetry out of semi-structured interviews with bereaved older adults. The raw interviews themselves are moving testimonies to the pain of bereavement but distilled into poetry they take on a new significance: they become compressed and highly vivid portraits of the shattering effects of grief. These research poems resonated greatly with me. As well as appreciating their immediacy and formal urgency, I also recognised my own pangs and pains in them, torments which I thought were unique to me, and me only. . .

Since April this year, I have been mourning the death of my brother. He was 48. My first friend and best friend. I love and miss him very much. And nothing makes sense. (I described his loss to a counsellor, somewhat pretentiously—but it felt right at the time, and still does to some extent—as ‘a great existential rent across the firmament of my being’). Many of the poems reproduced in Gerber’s study capture my own feeling of grief and loss—all those fluctuating states of being which, outside of cliché, I have been unable to put into words, despite feeling that I ought to be documenting this dreadfully momentous period in my life. Over the last few months, I have learnt that to experience grief is to be made aware of both the importance and inadequacy of language, that words often fail us when we need them most. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie puts it, ‘You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language’ [5].

Poetry, of course, is not to everyone’s taste. But whether we like it or not, there is no denying its power. (William Carlos Williams famously: ‘It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there’ [6].) Certainly, poetry has been a source of consolation for me in these recent months, the poetry of Thomas Hardy in particular—especially his Poems 1912–13. There is a wistful melancholy about Hardy’s words which I find peculiarly sustaining. One feels reading Hardy that grief, although ruthlessly unfair, somehow has ‘to be done. .. has to be expressed’ and that no matter how difficult the prospect, the ‘pain has to be endured’ [7]. His poems bring for me ‘a kind of peace’. Not a calming or reassuring peace, but a peace born of the assurance that what we have known and experienced ‘cannot disappear as if it had never been’ [8].

I hope readers of Age and Ageing find the poems in Gerber et al.’s paper as valuable and compelling as I do. One does not have to be well-travelled in grief to appreciate their emotional impact, and I commend the editors for publishing this novel article in a scientific journal dedicated to applied and clinical research. I am no expert in the study of ageing—but it seems to me that the so-called ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ disciplines have vital complementary contributions to make in the eclectic field of gerontology.

And besides, I think science and poetry have more in common than most people recognise. Both rely on metaphor, which as Ruth Padel points out, is as crucial to scientific discovery as it is to lyric description [9]. Whatever our field or endeavour, we are meaning-making beings, ever striving to understand, ever striving to be understood.

Declaration of Conflicts of Interest

None.

Declaration of Sources of Funding

None.

Acknowledgements

The quotation from Journey to Love by William Carlos Williams is used with kind permission of Carcanet Press and Penguin Random House.

References