by Michelle Hensley

Created on: July 27, 2007   Last Updated: January 04, 2012

If one was to say poetry doesn't matter in the 21st century, he or she must live in an extremely secluded, sad world. Poetry is around us every day; it is a driving force in our culture whether we notice it or not. Famous seventeenth century poet Percy Blythe Shelley had to defend poetry in his time. Shelley claims, in his "Defence of Poetry, that a poem "is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is a difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstances, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature. . ."

Poetry is not dead people! Shelley felt the need to defend the relevance of the eternal, divine nature of poetry in his time although poetry was rampant and a thriving cultural force. Poetry is all around us today and continues to reflect our human nature. When was the last time you heard a hip-hop song? Or any song? Poetry set to music is still poetry. And we all know the effect of those words on uswe connect with them on many levels. Did you attend your twelfth grade English class? Poetry. I was inspired by Milton's "Paradise Lost" as an eighteen year old, and it's a shame that many of my fellow classmates missed out of that experience simply because they didn't care enough to pick up the book. But I'm sure that if they had, they would have been touched by Milton's epic poem. These are the obvious examples of how poetry influences us.

Poetry is important to our society even if we don't realize it. How many of us wrote (and still write) poems as an outlet, never to see them published? I have, and I know many of my friends who did but would never admit it to any one else. What if those same people submitted those poems to poetry contests and won? They would obviously love to see their work published, and would be more than happy to receive a reward for it. Go online and you will find plenty of poetry contests to enter; if poetry wasn't important to people, why have poetry contests, poetry jams at book stores, coffee houses, and college campuses?

Poetry is expressive, complex, and yet it speaks to all of us on some plane. If we just take the time to read a poem, more than once, we will see the depths the poem can take and how it can touch our life beyond the surface of words it presents.

Source:

Shelley, Percy Blythe. "A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays." http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/adpoe10.txt.

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