What I mean to ask is more precise — surely poetry is important in the educational and artistic sense. It creates the aesthetic of a subject and articulates the beauty of things in a rhythmic and appealing pattern. It’s finding new ways of disclosing the poet’s reception of senses — ways that have never before been used so as to touch a deeper part of a human emotion.
Surely, poetry is important in this sense, and to students of Keats and Shakespeare, even more so, but I should preface that the question I pose has to do specifically to the human being — is poetry important to the common person? Is it important to the worker or the servant? Should the politician or lawyer care about the beauty of things as expressed in poetry? Would the practicing physician or the accomplished scientist benefit from the study of verse and meter? Is poetry intrinsically important to the human being?
It’s insufficient to answer this question merely at face value; there are assumptions that must be made to provide an answer worth qualifying. To start, it’s important to note what I mean when I say “human being.”
What does it mean to be a human being? Some say it is to have the features of a human — the hands to work, the feet to move, and a brain to reason. Maybe it means to have the eyes to see what could have been missed, ears to hear, and a mouth to tell the truth. Rather, some say it’s to have the emotions of a human — the ability to touch feelings and simultaneously have feelings that can be touched; the capacity to cry tears and provoke tears in others; the willingness to take heart and have a heart that can be taken too.
Perhaps being a human means to beautify the ordinary. From this perspective, being human means to postulate what is known and hypothesize what could be known. It means to prove theories for the sake of truth and to heal for the sake of community. Perhaps this is why we fight battles for the sake of our preservation and create art for the sake of capturing what pleases our senses. We protect our children because we’ve fallen in love, and we fall in love because we cannot seem to help ourselves. We solve mysteries because we are intrigued by the puzzle that has the possibility of leading us to the truth, and we worship that which we find to be sufficient to be our savior.
Of course, I could be wrong in this (I suppose I would just be human if I were), but if it were true that to be human simply means to notice what is beautiful, then poetry has a rightful place in the human story.
There are two factors that I find characteristic in poetry’s innate importance to the human being. The first is theme. A common objective in poetry is that something — whether a moment in time, a phase of life, or other — is captured. The ordinary of life is celebrated, and if that is — as I addressed earlier, what it means to be human — then being human is in itself poetry.
Yet one would also be wise to view it from the sense of plot, the second factor that I find in poetry’s importance. Of course, poetry is not always literal in a sense that a person could understand it at face value. Often times, it’s strange and metaphorical. Yet there is truth, however short, to the plot of poetry. Weak becoming strong, poor becoming rich, man becoming god — this is essentially what is happening.
Poetry is the beautification of things less likely to be taken as beautiful — the transformation of non-poetic subjects into a perceived holiness. It then follows that everything has some poetic potential — except for holiness itself — for holiness cannot be transformed into more holiness. In the same way, God cannot be made more into God. For this reason, though human life is poetry, it’s a stretch to claim that God’s life is poetry. It has neither transformational potential nor thematic advantage, for God’s life is hard-pressed to be improved.
God’s life, however, deteriorated in a very real and anthropomorphic way. Anthropomorphism is the concept of non-human things taking on human qualities. It’s Keats’ star and Shelley’s cloud. It’s Silverstein’s giving tree. It’s Tin Man wishing for a heart and Aslan speaking words.
God’s life, as He took on the quality of being a human, is the story of the strong becoming weak, vice the poetic theme of the weak becoming strong. It’s the rich becoming poor, divinity becoming less, and God himself stooping low to become man.
And when the omniscient Immortal descended, wept, and begged the heavens for a way around death, there is no greater sign that he knew what it was like to be a human being. In an observable way — in an importantly notable way — God’s life is the opposite of poetry.
It’s this very factor, this un-poeticness, that makes the human story poetry. It’s not simply the theme of capturing beauty that makes the human story poetic, but also, and arguably more importantly, the plot. An unpoetic element transforms into something beautiful, and that is what the human story consists of. The anthropomorphic, unpoetic, yet divine action has transformed our human lives into living examples of poetry.
Is poetry important to the human being?
It might be the most important thing one notices in his now-glorious life, a life sans nails, sans crosses, sans crown of thorns, sans everything that had already been done for his sake.
