The Value of Poetry in Society

The Value of Poetry in Society

By Kieran Beville

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” (T. S. Eliot)

 

In an age where speed dominates and silence is rare, poetry offers a spiritual and intellectual refuge. It resists commodification, eschews convenience, and asks not just for attention but for participation. Though often marginalised in public discourse or dismissed as arcane, poetry is one of the most enduring and essential human art forms. Its value is not merely ornamental—it is foundational. Poetry sharpens language, nurtures empathy, preserves cultural memory, challenges systems of oppression, and gives voice to what is often silenced. In short, it reminds us what it means to be human.

Poetry as the Language of Emotion and Truth

Poetry is a distilled form of experience. Unlike prose, which often explains or narrates, poetry illuminates and enacts. It does not describe emotion—it embodies it. Robert Frost observed, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words” (qtd. in Gioia). In this sense, poetry is not a translation of feeling into words, but a transformation of feeling into language.

This is why poetry is so often present at moments of great emotional intensity. Whether recited at weddings, funerals, revolutions, or vigils, poems provide a linguistic vessel for collective experience. Where logic and rhetoric fail, metaphor and rhythm speak. Dana Gioia remarked in his essay Can Poetry Matter? that “a society whose intellectual leaders lose the ability to articulate emotion eloquently eventually loses the capacity to think deeply.” Without poetry, society risks becoming intellectually and emotionally impoverished.

In addition, poetry nurtures the ability to name experiences that often go unnamed. It offers language for grief, joy, longing, and awe in ways other modes of discourse cannot.

Consider the ability of poets like Mary Oliver to transform encounters with nature into meditations on life and mortality. Her line, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” becomes both question and challenge (Oliver 94). Poetry can awaken us to the overlooked and the extraordinary within the ordinary.

Empathy and Social Connection

Poetry fosters empathy by allowing readers to inhabit perspectives other than their own. It collapses the boundaries of time, space, and identity. A poem written by a Tang Dynasty farmer or a modern-day refugee can reach a reader continents away and centuries later with astonishing immediacy. Audre Lorde insisted, “Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence” (Lorde 37). She viewed it as a survival tool for marginalised people, particularly women and people of colour, who must articulate realities ignored or erased by dominant structures.

This function of poetry is why it often resonates most strongly in marginalised spaces: in prisons, refugee camps, and grassroots movements. Slam poetry and spoken-word venues have reclaimed the public voice for communities long silenced. Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb,” performed at the 2021 U.S. Presidential Inauguration of Barak Obama, exemplifies this power. She declared, “Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished” (Gorman). Her words resonated not because they offered policy but because they articulated a shared, poetic vision of resilience.

Moreover, poetry helps people access their own emotions and extend compassion toward others. In classrooms and workshops, participants often report that reading and writing poetry improves their emotional well-being. A poem, by capturing a singular voice or moment, reminds us that every individual’s story holds meaning. In this way, poetry is an engine of empathy and solidarity.

Cultural Memory and Moral Witness

Throughout history, poetry has served as a guardian of cultural memory. It carries the values, losses, and dreams of entire civilisations. Percy Bysshe Shelley famously said, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” not because they pass laws, but because they shape the conscience of those who do (Shelley 123).

Seamus Heaney’s poems about the Northern Irish Troubles humanised conflict through intimate portrayals. In “Casualty,” he elegises a friend killed in a bombing, not as a martyr, but as a man: “He would drink by himself / And raise a weathered thumb / Towards the high shelf / Calling another rum” (Heaney 15). Heaney offers not an argument, but a life.

Similarly, under Soviet repression, poets like Anna Akhmatova became vessels of remembrance. Her poem Requiem was memorised and whispered among friends during Stalin’s purges. “No one is spared. Not even the unborn are safe,” she writes, transforming private grief into public testimony (Akhmatova 22). In this way, poetry becomes not just witness but resistance.

Likewise, poets like Mahmoud Darwish chronicled the Palestinian experience of displacement with lyrical precision, turning exile into myth. “We suffer from an incurable malady: hope,” he once wrote, revealing the poetic paradox of despair that clings to life. Through such poetry, historical trauma is preserved and dignified—not reduced to statistics but remembered in human terms.

Poetry as a Precision Tool of Language

Poetry honours language at a time when language is increasingly devalued. In an age of hashtags, soundbites, and slogans, poetry calls for nuance and depth. John F. Kennedy declared, “When power leads men toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses” (Kennedy). By treating language with reverence, poetry reasserts both linguistic and intellectual integrity.

Even minimalist forms like haiku demonstrate this. Bashō’s timeless lines—“An old silent pond… / A frog jumps into the pond— / Splash! Silence again”—convey the vastness of the universe in 17 syllables (Bashō 87). The careful crafting of poetry affirms the dignity of thought.

In doing so, poetry cultivates patience and attentiveness. It asks the reader to slow down and dwell with complexity—an act increasingly rare and radical. Through enjambment, rhythm, and ambiguity, poetry resists passive consumption and demands a deeper kind of engagement. It is an invitation to think more slowly, more carefully, and more creatively.

Poetry’s compressed form also heightens meaning through suggestion rather than explanation. A single metaphor may evoke an entire worldview. Unlike journalism or essays, poetry often thrives in contradiction, paradox, and silence, making space for the ineffable and the unspeakable.

Resistance and Reclamation

Poetry also functions as protest. Across centuries and continents, verse has challenged empires, racism, colonialism, and patriarchy. Langston Hughes captured the voice of Black America when he wrote, “I, too, sing America” (Hughes 45). His poetry did not demand permission—it declared belonging.

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric challenges readers to confront systemic racism not through argument but through lived experience. “You are you even before you grow into understanding you are not anyone, worthless” (Rankine 25). Her fragmented, genre-defying work insists that poetry need not conform to be powerful.

Because it can be metaphorical, elusive, and emotionally direct, poetry often slips past censorship and dogma. It speaks when others cannot—or dare not. And in doing so, it reclaims both personal and political space. Poets such as Joy Harjo, the first Native American U.S. poet laureate, use verse to reassert Indigenous presence and voice, reminding readers that literature is not neutral—it is always situated, always shaped by power and its absences.

Poetry in Contemporary Life

Far from obsolete, poetry is thriving in new forms and platforms. Social media poets like Rupi Kaur, while controversial in literary circles, have introduced millions to the genre. Slam and spoken-word communities are vibrant, especially among youth and marginalised voices. YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok have given new life to an ancient form.

This resurgence was especially visible during the COVID-19 pandemic. Online readings, virtual workshops, and a spike in poetry sales proved that in times of crisis, people turn to poetry not for escapism, but for meaning. According to TIME magazine, poetry sales in 2020 reached their highest point in over a decade (“The Pandemic Poetry Boom”).

Neuroscientific research suggests that reading poetry stimulates brain regions associated with introspection and reward, suggesting that its effects are both cognitive and emotional (Zeman et al. 132–158). Poetry, then, is not just an art—it is a tool for well-being.

Furthermore, poetry now frequently intersects with other art forms—visual art, music, film—and becomes multimedia. Poets are no longer confined to the printed page. Through podcasting, video performance, and digital storytelling, the reach of poetry has expanded dramatically, without losing its power to connect and challenge.

Conclusion: Why Poetry Still Matters

“A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it.” —Dylan Thomas

Poetry distils emotion, memory, and insight into forms that endure. It crosses borders, preserves culture, heals wounds, and inspires resistance. It offers not just aesthetic beauty, but moral clarity. Poetry speaks to what is most intimate and most urgent.

To devalue poetry is to devalue language, empathy, and the imagination itself. Poetry invites us to slow down and listen. It does not merely describe life—it reveals it. And that, above all, is why poetry matters.

 

Works Cited

Akhmatova, Anna. Requiem. Translated by D. M. Thomas, Norton, 2000.

Bashō, Matsuo. The Essential Bashō. Translated by Sam Hamill, Shambhala, 1999.

Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays. Harcourt, 1950.

Gioia, Dana. “Can Poetry Matter?” The Atlantic, May 1991.

Gorman, Amanda. “The Hill We Climb.” The New York Times, 20 Jan. 2021.

Heaney, Seamus. Open Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.

Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Vintage, 1994.

Kennedy, John F. “Remarks at Amherst College.” JFK Library, 26 Oct. 1963.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Crossing Press, 1984.

Oliver, Mary. New and Selected Poems. Beacon Press, 1992.

Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defence of Poetry. Oxford UP, 1904.

“The Pandemic Poetry Boom.” TIME, 25 Dec. 2020.

Zeman, Adam, et al. “Poetry and the Brain: Neural Markers of Aesthetic Experience.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 20, no. 9–10, 2013, pp. 132–158.