If I have a general cultural complaint it is that, first and most importantly, there are too few readers of poetry and, second but relatedly, too many of those readers are writers of poetry. It is the general conviction of this book that poetry elevates, liberates and ennobles human life and that the experience of poetry should be extended to as many people as possible. Poetry enlarges life with a range of observation, a depth of sentiment, a power of expression and an attention to language that simply eclipses any other medium. As I say below, poetry is life with the ray of imagination's power shot through it. It is my belief that a life without poetry is a life diminished, needlessly stunted.
Little there to disagree with, I think. There's a comic apologetic dance that readers and writers of poetry alike go through when talking about poetry, some kind of intuition that it's an antiquated or bourgeois pastime, that it is inconsequential or a harmless eccentricity, or that its sphere of effectiveness is diminished to a few thoughtful but impotent aesthetes.
This is partly so because one thinks of poetry as being either the rhythmic tapping-out of the banal or inaccessible and recondite shards wrung out of infinite complexity; and this is why John Betjeman and Geoffrey Hill are the twin inspirational spirits of contemporary dullness. One could be forgiven for navigating the poetry section at Foyles and thinking that Critchley's plea for poetry is the admirable formulation of an ideal cruelly flattened by reality.
Most readers not instinctively given to the vice of poetry would accord with Auden when he says, famously, 'Poetry makes nothing happen.' But that stanza, in a eulogy of W.B. Yeats, is as much a testament to Auden's own struggle with Yeats' ineffable music and barbarism as a dictum on poetry in general. What is not often recognised about that poem is simply how cruel it is – in eulogising Yeats, even imitating his distinctive meter, Auden belittles and negates much that Yeats believed about poetry, its ability to engender and capture worlds. It is a peculiarly English vice to be captured by the music but disown its sublimity.
(One of my favourite of Stevens' poems: To an Old Philosopher in Rome)
