Surprised by Poetry

An Appeal to our Non-Rational Selves

I consider myself a failed poet, a condition that has haunted me all my life. I wrote poetry as a child, and it was a child’s poetry, expressing childish yearnings, either wedded to old forms or struggling vainly towards some formless beauty. When we were very young, probably in fifth or sixth grade, my friends and I liked to read the stories and poems of Edgar Allen Poe. Some of us had even committed “The Raven” to memory. Years later, I studied poetry in college, wrote a few poems, and had a poem or two published in my college’s literary magazine. As an English major, I studied the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and every poem I wrote was an unconscious, or perhaps shameless, attempt at appropriation. It took me decades to get Eliot’s ghost off my shoulders, though I still pick up “Four Quartets” every now and then.

I went through a burst of poetry writing a few years ago. It was hard to shake the forms, the familiar meters, the rhyming. Each poem took me minutes to write and hours to rewrite and rewrite yet again. Only a handful of poems survived the operation, and those just barely. I am finally content to be a reader of good poetry rather than one who struggles to write it. Perhaps because I cannot overcome the effects of many years of legal writing, prose remains my chosen medium.

There are several books of poetry on my shelves, though many of their pages remain unread. I find it hard to sustain interest in a collection of a single poet’s work, or to rifle through anthologies looking for a poem that moves me. I rarely connect with a poem as the result of my own effort. It is mostly when I am not looking for them that poems find me.

Take, for instance, Ian McEwan’s novel “Saturday.” I had never read, or not remembered, Mathew Arnold’s poem, “Dover Beach.” It plays a critical role in McEwan’s story, and when I encountered it I was immediately struck by its profound beauty. I even began to memorize it long after I had read the book, but other distractions prevented me from completing the exercise.

I have committed at least one other poem to memory – Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” A few weeks ago, a law school friend I was preparing to interview for my podcast talked about his longstanding fondness for poetry, and we demonstrated to each other that we each could recite Frost’s poem by heart. I had no intention of looking for poetry in the interview, but there it was, a reminder of some common ground beneath us.

I have been surprised by poetry at other times – while attending the inauguration of a college president at which former Poet Laureate Billy Collins recited a poem he wrote for the occasion; while watching Amanda Gorman read the poem she had written for President Biden’s inauguration; when reading the weekly posts of a friend’s sister, who always ends with a poem that has some connection to her story; when stumbling upon a LinkedIn post of a lawyer I have come to know through my work with the American Bar Association; and while listening to a podcast interview of Joy Harjo, the current Poet Laureate of the United States, with whom I was entirely unfamiliar until two days ago. (I have since ordered two of her books – one a collection of poetry, the other a memoir). I was not looking for poetry in any of these settings, yet in each one a poem dropped down like an unexpected burst of sunshine on a cloudy day, and I happened to be in the right place to receive it.

So why care about poetry? There are many answers to that question. I start with this one.

We humans are complicated. We like to think of ourselves as rational. Entire economic constructs have been built around a model that assumes that people behave rationally. My own profession is built on a foundation of reason. Often our work lands at the intersection of law and economics, two pinnacles of rational thought. Economists sometimes serve as expert witnesses, explaining how the rational person would respond to the policies or practices at issue in a lawsuit. Their testimony may reflect prevailing economic theory or, as lawyers and judges like to say, may be “generally accepted in the scientific community.” Yet traditional economic theory may not adequately account for the non-rational threads that run through the fabric of our nature.

There is a growing body of research into these non-rational impulses that drive human behavior. Those impulses are hard to miss, as anyone who pays attention to current events is confronted with them daily. They seem to have risen to the surface in recent times, and are being exploited by those who know how to channel them for untoward purposes. The world of advertising has always understood and appealed to human unreason, and unfortunately, so have tyrants and their enablers.

But there is a brighter side to our extra-rational natures. Poetry, like faith and love and other art forms, reaches us where reason doesn’t. It reveals truths to us that are beyond rational comprehension. A good poem is a thing of beauty, a beauty we recognize when we see or hear it but that cannot easily be explained. It is language that transcends language, that reaches into the depths of our being, that touches our souls. Poetry is a place we go when literal narrative fails us. It beckons our inner selves and reminds us that we are more than linear thinkers. It is a reflection of the human spirit, a spark of our divinity, a place where we can connect with ourselves and others. And, as has been true throughout human history, it can inspire resistance to the darker forces of this world.

And so, I hope to continue to be surprised by poetry. I hope that more people I know will share the poems that mean something to them. I hope to continue to learn about poets whose poems will move me, even when my analytical powers fail to grasp their meaning, or when there is no particular meaning to be grasped. I hope to continue to see poems spring up in unexpected places, and to be approached by truth and beauty that would otherwise elude me. I hope that poetry can continue to make me stop in my tracks and remind me of the joy that is constantly ready to embrace us.