Poetry Matters, But Why?

Why does it trouble me that poetry no longer seems to matter in our culture? What does poetry do, and why do we need it?

This question nagged at me for years, but recently, my thoughts have been clarified, thanks to a terrifying book by Iain McGilchrist, THE MATTER WITH THINGS. He writes at length about the different forms of attention provided by the two hemispheres of the brain. As human beings, we need both forms, but our societies often prioritize one form of attention above the other, or even pretend that only one form exists.

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To summarize badly what is, in McGilchrist's book, a detailed and nuanced argument: the right hemisphere of the brain is attentive to the broad scope of life, to time as flow, to experience as a shifting interaction with a living world. It recognizes that other people are as real as we are, and that they, too, harbour a concealed, subjective experience of life.

In opposition to this, the left hemisphere wields a set of specialized tools: it solves problems by turning living forms into abstractions or mechanisms, by reducing the flow of time to points on a graph, by transforming landscapes into maps. These reductive tools are essential to human survival, but the left hemisphere can lose itself in abstraction: then it mistakes abstract data for reality, living beings for machines, maps for terrain. It mistakes isolated moments of lifeless time as more objective and real than the flowing tangle of human experience.

The right hemisphere is able to integrate the abstract conclusions of the left into a broader, living perspective. The result is a back-and-forth communication between two necessary modes of responding to the world, but sometimes, this communication becomes one-sided. While the right hemisphere accepts a need for the reductive problem-solving tools of the left, the left often disregards the integrations, the reminders and insights, of the right. It assumes that its created abstractions are the real thing, that its reductive tools are the only valid ones for existence.

When societies grow in complexity, when they face more and more technical challenges, they rely more and more on left-hemisphere methods. They teach the methods in schools. They reward the methods with money. They often reach a point where they consider these methods the only "realistic" approach to life, and they dismiss the second thoughts, the warnings, the broad perspectives of the right hemisphere, as unprofitable distractions.

Iain McGilchrist argues that Western society has trapped itself within a cage of reductive left-hemisphere attention, that it disregards or dismisses the troubling yet living perspectives of the right.

In his own words:

"Public discourse in a culture can accentuate some ideas, concepts, beliefs and values at the expense of others. And when this happens, it is not as if these ideas, concepts, beliefs or values are atomistic; they bring with them a largely coherent world-picture, which gradually forms itself in the culture, and over time is expressed in a myriad of ways. I believe our own culture is unbalanced in the degree to which the left hemisphere’s take predominates. And, unfortunately, the left hemisphere is decidedly imperceptive -- and so is unaware there is a problem."

The result is a world of machine systems fit only for machine-people, of algorithms considered more intelligent than human consciousness, of a natural world increasingly exploited and poisoned, of human relationships and political systems rapidly falling apart. It often seems that our entire way of life has been designed to ignore the wider, deeper, empathetic awareness of the right hemisphere.

We still have right hemispheres, but many of us ignore them, or distrust them, or consider them irrelevant to our consumer-capitalist, oligarchic present. The cost of our denial is human misery.

How can we escape from this trap?

For a start, we can, each of us, begin to pay attention to our forsaken right hemispheres; we can begin to communicate with our own selves. One form of communication is complex melodic music; another is poetry.

Poetry and music are akin: both rely on sound, on complex yet regular rhythms, on suggestive and fleeting moods, on things not quite understood yet felt in the bones.

I would suggest that we no longer value poetry because we no longer value the broader, living perspectives of human attention. If we immerse ourselves in poetry, if we begin to appreciate its visceral impact, then we can train ourselves to recognize and to heed the promptings of the right hemisphere.

This argument for utility ignores an important truth: poetry, like music, is beautiful. Poetry, like music, can move us in ways hard to explain yet impossible to disregard. Poetry, like music, cultivates an aesthetic and emotional appreciation of life, and this appreciation can make us more complete, more aware, more human.

Poetry belongs to us in the way that webs belong to spiders, that hives belong to bees and hornets. We create poetry, we read and recite poetry, because we need it. Here in this appalling century, we have been taught to believe that poetry no longer matters, because we have been taught to believe that human lives no longer matter.

Both assumptions are wrong; both can be corrected, if we have the will to confront them.