A prelude to this evening’s “Drink” with Alexander McCall Smith on the importance of poetry, we republish Mark Vernon‘s piece on how great poets use the energy of words

How does poetry work? What does poetry do to us? My favourite theory comes from Owen Barfield, the great friend of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. He has a proposal about the remarkable way that poetry functions, and it has to do with words.

The dynamic he describes so impressed Tolkien that the writer on wizards and hobbits underwent the great labours of creating an entire language and literature for the elvish people of his imagination. Only then did he feel he could convincingly enter the world of Middle-earth. So, what was Barfield’s big idea?

At heart, Barfield insisted that words have soul; the sounds we breathe on the air carry a vitality and convey a living meaning. Words are not just physical vibrations shaped by our mouths and tongues, nor are they mere signs for the things around us: “tree”, “rock”,“cup”. They bring experiences, echo histories, focus desires, release relationships.

The poet works with this energy by positioning words in creative ways, so that the inner stories held by language can be re-released afresh. The reader of poems loves that sense of revelation and to read a poem is to travel inwardly, reach horizons, and peer into other worlds.

Take two words to gain a sense of this magic, as Barfield suggested: “old” and “prophets”. First, consider the phrase, “old prophets” and ask what connotations come to your mind? For me, I think of bearded men and grizzled crones, times past and antiquated wisdom. Make a mental note.

And now, second, read a different phrase: “prophets old”. What associations emerge with that? The changed inflection, the poetic air conjured by the inversion of the words, prompts a different imagining. With “prophets old” my mind is now ready for timeless wisdom and forgotten insights. I think of figures I would like to hear; of guides whom I would repeatedly read.

Poets arrange words in unexpected, non-prosaic ways to express otherwise hidden resonances, thereby unleashing spirits that can revive us. Barfield argued that when reading a poem, the important aspect to keep in mind is the energy of the lines, and only secondarily to be concerned with their meaning. To ask too soon: “What is this about?”, is to break the spell. Instead, stay in the zone of not fully knowing, and you will receive unsought feelings, unexpected insights.

The genius of a great poem is not therefore, fundamentally, about novel aesthetics or clever linguistics; a great poem might quite literally save lives.

Take the case of the philosopher John Stuart Mill. A child prodigy, he was the subject of educational experiments at the hands of his fanatical father, who was a disciple of the utilitarian innovator Jeremy Bentham. The upshot was that Mill was reading Greek and Latin before most kids can tie a shoelace, and became dangerously depressed in his late teens. As he writes in his Autobiography, he faced a calamitous mental crisis because, with reaching that age “the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down”. His learning had left him akin to an automaton; his advanced intellect had run way ahead of his emotional capacities, leaving him unhinged. The situation became serious, to the point where he contemplated suicide.

But poetry saved him. One day, he happened to pick up an anthology of William Wordsworth’s poems and found, in the lines, a vitality and soulfulness that restored his humanity. “What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thoughts coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty,” he explains.

You can feel the invocation still. Take a poem by Wordsworth’s great collaborator, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Dejection: An Ode” speaks of the kind of existential hopelessness Mill had faced. “A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear, | A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief, | Which finds no natural outlet or relief | In word, or sigh, or tear.”

In such lines, a despairing person may find a mirror and, perhaps, the comfort of realising that someone else understands the dire predicament. But a poem can do more than reflect your own inner state; it can lead you to a threshold, from which a renewed life can be appreciated and welcomed.

Consider Wordsworth again and his poem, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”. The verse begins with a lamentation for the youthful experience of lively nature lost with age, though then invites the reader to look again. The pivotal lines are these:

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Barfield, too, was saved from despair by Wordsworth. His formative years were those of the First World War, during which he witnessed the industrialisation of violent conflict and the rise of the machines that turned France into killing fields. He felt that he saw in the bloodshed not only the destruction of a generation but the annihilation of the human soul. Only poetry offered salvation because the words of verses restored what had been seemingly lost; like the blue hour before dawn, when the sun has not yet appeared but the mood of the night is shifting, he was able to follow that thread of hope and find a way back to a joyful life.

And more than that, because poetry also provided a power that not only revived his consciousness, but transformed it.

In an autobiographical reflection, Barfield writes: “The face of nature, the objects of art, the events of history and human intercourse betray significances hitherto unknown as the result of precisely these poetic or imaginative combinations of words to which I have referred. I found I knew things about them which I had not known before.” Poetry was an education.

The anguish felt both by the victim of utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill, and the child of a mechanical age, Owen Barfield, can drain people’s lives of colour to this day. But there is a remedy; there is a way to warm the soul. Words, especially when spoken by a poet.

Mark will present a new Thought for the Week on this evening’s “A Drink with the Idler” – see below.

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A Drink with the Idler

Our guest on “A Drink with the Idler” this evening (Thursday) is Alexander McCall Smith, best-selling author of The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, who will be talking to Tom Hodgkinson about the importance of poetry.

Mark Vernon will also present a new Thought for the Week.

That’s Thursday 4 June, 6pm-7pm.

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