If society needs bankers, it needs poets. If society needs doctors, it needs poets. If society needs builders and cleaners and sellers and shelf-stockers and stock-brokers, it needs poets. If society needs judges and lawyers and cops and social workers, it SURELY needs poets! If society needs teachers, well - then society needs poets, for both professions - both callings - are symbiotic - we are all and for as long as we live, teachers and students at once.
For as long as man has been sentient, which, by definition may be a redundancy, (he) has pondered our purpose for being. What are we supposed to be doing. What is a life well spent? Is the thinker as noble as he who gets his hands dirty to get his and his family's daily bread? Do the bards and athletes and clergy and actors and musicians play - um - second fiddle to the doctors and builders and cooks and farmers? This pondering of the meaning of life is as old as consciousness itself. Why are we here? What's the point of living if you're not, well, LIVING - as in, living life to it's fullest and most enriching. Work to live or live to work? Carpe diem or contemptus mundi?
That is really what this question, this nontonal earwig that taunts "Am I making a difference? Am I living fully?", is provoking. It's just another version of the song-that-never-ends to which we sentient folks love to subject ourselves: What is the right balance between assuring our simple survival (alas, "hunting and gathering" and other work), and the very point of survival (alas - love, play, pleasure, sharing, talking, sex, food, joy, sport, sensing, feeling, loving and LIVING!)? The utility and self-worth of work, and the sheer reason we are here to begin with - that is, the celebration and joy of play and passion! - these two elements absolutely do and must dance!
Surely among those joys and gifts and indulgences and epiphanies and discoveries and passions in life sits the utter soul of mankind - in poetry! I guess the question hinges on how each of us defines "need". "Need", the noun, is relatively easy. Our basic, single-unit needs (that is, those needs the fulfilling of which the survival of one biological entity depend) are food, water, air, and the space to do the work to metabolize these things, as well as produce and manage them - ie, our basic eco-system. These are our basic physical needs. A bit more complex a consideration soon reveals another primary need for species survival - reproduction, and the physical act and behavior related thereto!
I think that last little matter segues rather nicely to considering another possible definition of "need". I talk here of the verb "need". What is it to *need*? What do we really NEED? Well, in these questions, we find the element of "want" sneaking into the picture. Does the absence of the purpose of sustaining biological functioning disqualify a mere want from the elevated status of "need"?
The answer to that question is as unique and varied and complex as the civil and biological society we humans inhabit and comprise. Does my body, and does the biological ecosystem of society need poets and poetry?
No.
But that is not the point. The point is that the maintenance and justification of said society - and LIFE! - does need the thing so aptly fulfilled by poetry.
And that need is MEANING! The 'how' of survival does, indeed, need the 'why' to justify itself! Thus, we individuals, and the society we make, do most assuredly NEED to have a purpose! We need to have a reason to get up the next morning, and the next evolutionary or societal cycle! Without a purpose, without a question to pique our individual and collective curiosities, both the scientists and the artists may as well die.
The poets and the sculptors and the playwrites and the musicians and the athletes and the thinkers and the feelers ALL help answer this vital question.
Does society *need* poets? I don't know. Does it want them? Yeah. And the difference between the two, the needing and the wanting - is perhaps best left, indeed, to the poets.