Is Poetry a Waste of Time

Guest Post by Abby Counsil

I was always a curious child. I am a curious adult too, but my questions now are harder to answer, and that bar was pretty high to begin with. But questions are not bad things. Questions are not things to fear, though sometimes the space between the question and the answer is enough to get my heart rate up. The important part is the asking. Here are the questions I have asked today:

How often am I scared and of what?

How many times will I exist in my life?

How confident am I in being understood, and what does a misunderstanding cost?

Can you be loved and not understood? Can you be known and not loved? Does a painter love the brushstroke of a child’s first attempt? Does a child love the colors of the artwork? Does the wind love the windchimes or the rim of an empty jar? Does the bottle love the message and the ocean love the bottle?

Is poetry a waste of time?

I do not have all of the answers to all of the questions. I have an indirect answer to the last one.

Selfishness and loneliness come from the same place. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Where your heart is, there is treasure, logically. Selfishness brings the hoard, and dark, dim caves, and no sun to shine on piles of slowly rusting coins while the drip of water from stalactites fails to mimic rain. Loneliness is the heart hidden in the mountain-coffin until the stone becomes contagious. It is the Medusa-sickness that turns the heart to stone.

Poetry is the one thing I have found that cures both. There is no such thing as selfish, or lonely, or cold caves, or fear, or the monster under the bed when poetry is a night-light in the outlet in the corner. Why not plug the light in? Is it a waste of time to plug the light in? Is it better to spend the inky hours too paranoid to loosen your grip on the covers?

There was a writer in England in the 1860s named Matthew Arnold. He wrote many essays, and many poems, and many essays about poems. It is in an essay on culture, however, that Arnold wrote, “But the idea of beauty and of a human nature perfect on all its sides, which is the dominant idea of poetry, is a true and invaluable idea” (416). It is worth noting that Arnold is not speaking of perfection in the sense of a flawless completion, but in the sense of eternal and general growth and exploration.

Poetry surrounds the contraction and expansion of humanity’s intrinsic ingredients. If the elements of a person are simplified, then simplified, then simplified again, what is left can only be expressed through the act of creation.

Poetry is only a waste of time when expression becomes void. When being loved and understood no longer matters to mankind, when memorializing the evidence of our existence is no longer valuable, and when people lose the instinct to reach out and keep reaching, poetry will be a waste of time. When humanity no longer exists, poetry will be a waste of time. I imagine we have quite a long way to go before then.

With all sincerity

Abby Counsil         

Abby Counsil is a senior in college and a lifelong lover of the written word. Writing is one step in her dream to join the authors of the world in finding poetry in the mundane."                                                                                    

Works Cited

Arnold, Matthew. “Sweetness and Light.” Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, edited

by A. Dwight Culler. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961.