What`s The Use Of Poetry?

by Henry Arthur Jones; — March 29th, 2010 - 6:55pm - 0 comment(s)

Here’s an article published by Henry Arthur Jones (circa 1900) entitled “What's the Use of Poetry? “ I felt I should post it for your reading pleasure. Enjoy...

What's the use of poetry? - Why to live upon, when one can't get bread and cheese; to clothe and warm oneself with, when one is ragged and cold!

What's the use of poetry? - To keep faith and hope and worship alive in the heart of man, to reconcile him to life, to make him at home in his world.

What's the use of poetry? - To pour vitriol on deceit and vice, to seam and scar the detested face of hypocrisy and lies. To add hate to all things hateful and shame to all things shameful!

What's the use of poetry? - To give beauty to beauty, more grace to grace, more truth to truth, to deck the flowers of the field, to rain perfume on the rose and music on the nightingale.

What's the use of poetry? - To be a stumbling block to the worldly wise and the proud, and a camp and pillar of fire to children and the childlike.

What's the use of poetry? - To embalm the immortal dead, to interpret this aimless Universe, to snatch the secrets of the stars, to unleash the seas and the winds, to fling a double rainbow of hope and glory across the heavens, till all the Universe shouts with one voice, and beats with one heart, and pants with one breath!

What's the use of poetry? - To make this wide world drunk with its loveliness, to make this garret a palace and me the King of Death and Fate!

Poetry not real, not useful! It is you who are not real, you practical people-you herd of money grubbers, you bats, you owls, you moles, you human vegetables, who root yourselves and fatten up your dull, petty, miserable lives, and eat and drink and sleep, and buy and sell and toil in one long round of humdrum death-in-life!

It is you who are not real. You were dead and huddled into oblivion before you were born; you do not live at all; you are smoke from the nostrils of death.

Poetry not real, not useful! There is nothing useful but poetry, and nothing real but the poet!