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When 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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