Can poetry change your life?

“But what, in the end, do we get from poems and songs? “Aesthetic life is a sphere of self-directed activity whose external ramifications, despite periodic utopian exuberances, are minimal at best,” Robbins concludes (somewhat contradicting his “community” theory). Is this so? Are we past the days when people wrote poetry and read it for encouragement and guidance, the days when poetry was not merely a “self-directed activity” but was writing about something?

It certainly was once. On August 4, 1914, Great Britain declared war on Germany. On August 5th, the first war poem appeared in the London Times—“The Vigil,” by Henry Newbolt. By the end of the year, at least two anthologies of war poetry were out, “Poems of the Great War” and “Songs and Sonnets for England in War Time.” Many would follow. Around the time the fighting ended, four years later, more than two thousand British and Irish writers had written poems about the war.

We might assume that the First World War inspired a lot of poems because that’s how people expressed themselves in the age of print, and that people express themselves differently today because the media are different. But we would assume wrong. Donald Trump was elected President on November 8, 2016. A poem about his election, “You’re Dead, America,” by Danez Smith, appeared on BuzzFeed on November 9th.

A few days later, hundreds showed up in Washington Square Park for a pop-up poetry reading sponsored by the Academy of American Poets and the Web site Brain Pickings. Three days after the Inauguration, the Times columnist Nicholas Kristof announced a Donald Trump Poetry Contest. He got about two thousand submissions. Several anthologies with anti-Trump poems have already come out, including, in May, “Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now” (Knopf), edited by Amit Majmudar, who was one of the winners in Kristof’s contest.

Every crisis is an opportunity for poetry, even in the twenty-first century. There are anthologies of 9/11 poems and anthologies of Iraq War poems. There are climate-change poems, income-inequality poems, and Black Lives Matter poems. Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen: An American Lyric,” a book-length poem about race, identity, and the imagination, has sold almost two hundred thousand copies since it was published, in 2014. After the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015, hundreds of thousands read “It is not Paris we should pray for,” posted on social media by the Indian poet Karuna Ezara Parikh. When the going gets stressful, the stressed want poems.”