– Elizabeth Melville in a letter to her mother in1859 regarding her husband’s shift from fiction to poetry.
One writer who took this fear seriously was Muriel Rukeyser.
It was a theme for her talks at Vassar, Columbia and elsewhere and it is the title of the opening chapter to her The Life of Poetry first published in 1949. You can read a key extract presented by Anthony Wilson as a poem here.
Ruykeyser would have had no issue with Wilson’s description of poetry as “life-saving”.
For Rukeyser, the problem was never simple indifference to poetry. It was something deeper and more telling. Modern culture, she argued, prides itself on using every available resource – technology, science, information – yet sidelines one of the most human resources of all. Poetry becomes “one kind of knowledge – infinitely precious… never to be used. And that is poetry.”
That refusal comes at a cost. By neglecting poetry, “we cut ourselves off… and impoverish ourselves,” losing a way of understanding experience that goes beyond facts and into feeling. Poetry offers “an approach to the truth of feeling,” helping us face grief, love, fear, and conflict – the parts of life that data alone cannot solve.
So the resistance she observed is really fear. “This resistance has the quality of fear, it expresses the fear of poetry.” A poem asks something of us. “A poem invites you to feel… it invites a total response.” That emotional openness can be unsettling in a culture trained to value utility, specialization, and control.
In Times of Crisis
For Rukeyser, then, poetry is not decorative but practical. She calls it a “transfer of human energy” – a way of passing consciousness, empathy, and connection from one person to another. In times of crisis especially, “there is no resource which we can afford to overlook or to misunderstand.” Poetry becomes a means of strengthening the imagination and repairing the bonds between people. It is not an ornament but a form of doing: a way of working on the self and engaging the world.
Her claim remains bracingly simple. Poetry isn’t extra. It is a “natural resource,” a necessary power that helps us “deal with our lives,” an invitation “to come to the emotional meanings at every moment.” In short, it is practice for being fully human.
The two anthologies in the featured image – alongside Hammershøi’s quiet interior – belonged to my parents. Each carries its own story, and both, in their small way, bear out Rukeyser’s thesis.
Featured image: Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior from the Home of the Artist. Detail.
I am definitely afraid of poetry. It is so difficult to give it the space it deserves. And to rise to the challenge it throws out.
But also — oppositely — it is so difficult to cope with bad poetry. Bad poetry too exposes the frailty of the human condition.
Do you have a way to tell the difference? Between the good and the bad?
Well, I have written plenty of bad poetry … and I have written poetry that I still think is good that some other people think is bad. Eye of the beholder stuff, isn’t it?
But perhaps one guide to bad poetry is unoriginal thoughts clothed in unoriginal language, and the sad thing about that is it is often perfectly sincere and heartfelt.
That’s well put Craig. And you got me thinking – in particular about I.A.Richards who was once an arbiter of good and bad and wrote a whole book about it. (Practical Criticism, 1929). I wonder whether he is much “taught’ or read these days. Now – I’m going to have to go back and re-read it.
So many people are gunshy about expressing themselves and steering clear of poetry who are equally matched by those who think every expression of personal feeling or observation – however trite and second-hand – is deep. In some way “the critics” created a tremendous fear of poetry by their insistence on standards and quality.
Richards conducted that famous experiment at Cambridge presenting anonymous poems to his students for their written commentary. He used Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s work as his prime example of bad poetry. He found it facile, sentimental and shallow. To him it offered easy, unearned emotional gratification while insulting readers’ intelligence through vague language and stereotyped feelings.
These were what then led readers to what Richards called “stock responses” – conventional reactions induced by empty emotional ideas about love or grief. Such poems – he said – did not engage the reader with actual complexity of language or feeling. He noted that his very clever students usually failed the test of critical judgment.
My guess is that the effect of his book and the fulminations of all the other major critics of his era was to create a tremendous self-doubt in their readers who became fearful of saying what they actually enjoyed for fear of being considered shallow and imperceptive. In that scenario – best steer clear of the stuff for fear of being judged.
Hi Josie,
Thanks for this! It’s fun to have a long-distance chat about poetry.
I remember I had my own Ella Wheeler Wilcox moment as an undergraduate when in a tutorial I admitted to a fondness for the verse of C J Dennis. The professor leading our group was horrified — I think we were meant to be admiring Christopher Brennan, a Dennis contemporary but utterly unalike.
Now, these days nobody reads either of these people, although one was once popular with ordinary Australians and the other did surely ‘engage the reader with actual complexity of language or feeling’, as Richards (or my professor) might have noted approvingly.
What you say about the role of fulminating critics is true. In my case, it successfully put me off C J Dennis (who is pretty awful, that’s true – see ‘The Songs of the Sentimental Bloke at https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks/e00018.html). But it didn’t turn me into a Brennan fan (you might see why if you attempt ‘Poems 1913’ at https://open.sydneyuniversitypress.com.au/9781920899844/index.html).
Now I wonder what poets I do like? It’s a risky question to answer, isn’t it? It’s quite revealing. So, at risk of being judged, I’ll say Charles Bukowski and Philip Larkin. But that’s just today. And between us.
I won’t tell your secret to a soul! (Phillip Larkin is rather respectable these days – often a set poet for UK examining boards.)
That heavy pressure to make the right and proper and correct judgement – the heavy hand of F.R.Leavis et al – made ordinary mortal students afraid to like anything for themselves. Institutionally induced fear of poetry is real. And here’s a few factoids – people – ordinary people – used to read and write the stuff. Daily newspapers printed it. People turned to it for inspiration, entertainment, and solace.
To be continued …. And now I am going to follow your links.
What a surprise, I did not know that such ‘fear’ exists. I might have lived in a bubble of ignorance, or my education had turned out sensibly.
So many phobias. So little time. There is something for everyone.
For example, consider arachibutyrophobia. It is fear of peanut butter being stuck to the roof of your mouth.
I have taught poetry to college students and their fear of poetry is palpable.. And It is very hard to “teach” a poem — where to start? rhyme?, meaning? word choice? subject matter? It would be good practice for all of us to try to “teach” a poem to understand how difficult it can be. Try it on a friend.,
This is true.
And yet – no four year old is afraid of rhyme, rhythm, metre, musicality, and joy of poetry.
And yet – in times of great distress and crisis we turn again to poetry. Rukeyser may have been on to something.
To be continued….