One of the shocks of thinking about doing English Literature at university is having to read poetry.
I haven’t read poetry for fun (Lewis Carrol’s Jabberwocky excepted) since I was in primary school and had a copy of Julia Donaldson’s Crazy Mayonaissy Mum – an anthology containing some very silly poems.
My impression, formed from lazy prejudices and GCSE English Literature, was that great poetry was slightly soppy and about nature or incredibly depressing and about the horrific conditions of the first world war trenches.
Fortunately, I’ve now started to read Simon Armitage’s Box of Matches and Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters. For the first time, I’ve realised how desire and lust and bitterness and guilt can be wrought from an assemblage of so few words and sounds in such a small space.
Reading poetry has fallen out of fashion as a leisure activity. In the twenty-first century, we primarily access literature through novels, or perhaps watching film adaptations. Of course, the explosive spread of social media means we are not entirely unaccustomed to cramming meaning into a small space. However, reading poetry has for me, so far, been a little like a sort of therapy, cross-pollinated with spring cleaning for the brain.
The presentation of words on the page, the structure, as well as the marriage of sounds which binds the whole thing together, is so crucial, and utterly missing from, say, a tweet.
In The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald writes: “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store in his ghostly heart”. I’m starting to think of poems as little pieces of “fire or freshness” which we can carry around with us, or as candles you light and renew with a prayer, or, if you’re secular-minded like me, a thought of the rest of humanity.
I’m beginning to think reading poetry for pleasure may be the challenge of the next generation of pedagogues. I just hope this doesn’t extinguish the pleasure for ever.
