Poetry in Society

Abstract

The last chapter discussed the content of poetry. In this chapter we consider some of the functions of poetry in the society to which it is addressed: its audience. All societies have had poets and it may occur to us to wonder why. A language is the main way in which a society expresses itself and coheres through understanding. In the last chapter we said that a language is a living thing that grows and must constantly renew itself. Poetry which renews by using it in fresh, unautomatic and unpredictable ways is the heart of any language’s struggle to live vigorously and maintain a high quality of life throughout the social body in which it circulates. In his ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth says:

Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing: its object is truth … not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion … The poet writes under one restriction only, namely the necessity of giving immediate pleasure … The end of poetry is to produce excitement in co-existence with an overbalance of pleasure … We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure … wherever we sympathise with pain it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure.

What benefit canst thou, or all thy tribe to the great world?

Keats, ‘The Fall of Hyperion’