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Poets & Poetry
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| Yes | 83% | 976 votes | Total: 1173 votes | |
| No | 17% | 197 votes |
Yes
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Add to FavoritesWhen the aliens invade, or the mad scientists working on a doomsday machine finally manage to tip the world off its axis and send us all plummeting into the sun, and they start herding the great and the good onto spaceships to start mankind's journey into the stars along with the Engineers and the physicists and the world leaders they better save a seat or two for poets.
Because without them, the world that science will build cannot begin to reflect grace, or beauty, or compassion or love. All the things that throughout the centuries, poets have expressed on behalf of their peers; taking and shaping and bending and occasionally breaking language, so that it can express the most ethereal fantasies of our souls. Poetry has praised gods, caused revolutions, and at its best and fullest flowering spoken though the ages. Poetry has given the wit and wisdom on one generation safely into the minds of the next; Enheduanna made Innana immortal, Beowulf and Grendal still thrill a modern audience, Shakespeare contributed more words to the English language than any other single author. Language, that most amazing invention of man, owes its power to poetry.
Philosophy and religion, from the Song of Solomon to the metaphysics of Donne, are shaped by poetry; no age has captured its zeitgeist more completely than in its poetry. And the individual too is reliant on poems and poetry for expression. Each stage of life invites its own song. No matter how absurd they seem to us, each teenager is sure that their scribbled lines of angst-ridden doggerel are both profound and original. They reach for poems as naturally as a suckling babe for a breast. The chaos and turmoil of puberty seeks to reach out beyond itself, and in the process helps shape the adult within. The lover stumbling over lines on a Valentine may be a poor reflection of Barrett and Browning but is a shining example of how love for another transforms us into something braver and better than our everyday self.
Society needs poets; in fact society has little choice in the matter. Poets exist to imagine society, to create it and to express it in its nobility and evil. Poetry cannot be suppressed or regulated; and without it society becomes merely a collection of clever apes existing. In poetry, we become human, and society becomes civilization.
Learn more about this author, Geraldine Moorkens Byrne.
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No
Society does not need poets
Nor does it need dancers, painters, sculptors, or whores,
Neither musicians, magicians, jugglers, and more
Neither tamers of lions, billionaire's scions, athletes, oracles or
Comedians, palm and tarot card readers,
Benders of spoons, religious leaders,
Or any purveyors of dubious ilk
Not to suggest that the poet and tarot card reader
Are both cut from the same ethical cloth,
The latter's a parasite, a loathsome charlatan
A pathetic, dependent, intellectual sloth
Whereas
The poet's a literate weaver of words
Conjuring, clashing, conveying thoughts
Heartfelt and wished and frivolous
While masquerading sinister plots
Yet, the "ilk" shared with the tarot card reader?
No life sustaining work is accomplished
Life sustaining work is
Cutting grass, feeding a baby, designing anti-lock brakes
A medical checkup, roofing a house
Fixing a faucet, and manufacturing a cardboard box,
Negotiating, litigating, and building a bridge,
Conducting children safely across a school zone,
Administering psychiatry, paving a street
Installing software, preparing a meal,
Launching defensive military counter-attacks.
You know the list by now,
And the list goes on..
Consider an exchange
of the
Product of the effort of a chicken farmer
for the
Product of the effort of a poet laureate
then the
Farmer would starve on verbal ingenuity
while the
Belly of the poet would be full
How barren, empty, void and devoid
And chilly, and frigid, and cold
Life would be
Without the humanities
Without the arts
Without the poetry
Some might accuse
Wager, I would, that more poets
and musicians
and actors
and sports
and more celebrity stars
Suffer from mental illness and dis-
association
from
r eality
than
People whose minds and hands
Are concretely occupied,
Producing actual material results:
The proverbial farmer,
The prosaic engineer,
The doctor, the grocer, and the student pushing
A mower across a lawn
The list goes on..
..and poets aren't on it
Me, I have a passion for poetry,
especially composing it. If I found myself with a receptive audience, to whom I could publish my works, I would definitely exploit the pecuniary opportunity and invest any proceeds in real estate development.
Learn more about this author, Hugh Mann.
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Difference of opinion? Debate now.
- Poets & Poetry
- Is it better to write a poem based on experience or based on opinion?
- Does the best poetry come from the heart or from the mind?
- Does poetry matter in the 21st century?
- Which form of poetry is best for expressing passion: A sonnet or a villanelle?
- Is free verse really poetry?
- Can 'bad' poetry have value?
