The purpose of poetry

Art by Mike Flemming

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/04/the-purpose-of-poetry

” I believe the personal is also political.  I remember a time about 10 years ago when I audited a poetry writing class at the University of Chicago as an “older adult.”  (I was 36, but easily the oldest student in the class!).  When it was my turn to submit a poem to the workshop, I offered a piece about my two kids fighting over a doughnut in the back seat of our mini-van.  I’ll never forget the first comment from one of my classmates:  “Your poem is so real.  It’s really about something.”  He meant the words as a compliment.  Even if my poem was not about anything particularly enormous, it was grounded in everyday reality unlike any of the poems my classmates had offered before me.   And Smith’s memoir Just Kids is artful, I’d argue, because of its personal observations.

I don’t mean to be making any grand distinctions here. But, speaking crudely, I think we are living in an age of artistic abstraction. The purpose of poetry,” Sir Philip Sidney famously pronounced, “is to instruct and to delight.”  The order of those two points seems pointed.  Delight, to him, is a secondary concern.  While Sidney’s epigram might hold just as powerfully today, I don’t think the order of points would remain the same. In contemporary poetry I believe there has been a turn toward abstraction and a turning away (however slight) from poetry of everyday reality and the poetry of social conscience.”