Can Poetry Matter?

It’s a profound question. Can poetry matter? I suppose it depends on what you mean by matter. To what depth must it go in order to achieve this status? Does poetry have meaning? Of course it does. But does it mean enough to truly matter to those that read or write it?

The answer is not simple.

In a way, it is a simple question. The answer, of course, is yes, poetry can matter. It matters because it is the art form that has given us our most celebrated moments in the history of humanity. Poetry is where we first hear of the fall of Troy, where we learn of the deeds of Hercules, the battles of King Arthur, the creation of the world, and the eventual destruction of it. The very first words written down on the very first page were poems. The very first person to tell a story, and the first to have their story retold, was a poet. And they did so in a language that no one else understood, using a form that would only be understood later as a poem. Poetry was born of a need to share information with others who would not otherwise be able to hear it.

So, yes, poetry can matter. It has always mattered. But, of course, if it did not, we would not have asked the question in the first place.

It has always mattered. And yet, even though it matters, it has not always had the meaning that we would like to think it does. Even when it comes from non-fiction. And the meaning that it does have is not always what we might wish for.

It’s important to realize that the word matter means different things to different people, depending on their perspective. To scientists, matter is anything that occupies space and has mass. A poet would call that ‘stuff’, but it’s the same thing. To an engineer, matter is any substance that has mass and takes up space. To an economist, matter is anything that produces goods or services and is therefore exchangeable on a market. And so on.

As for meaning, the meaning of words depends on who you ask. If you are an engineer or a scientist, you will tend to say that matter has a purpose. If you are an engineer or a scientist who is working on a project to develop some new technology, then that purpose will be to make some new machine, or something that goes into that machine, or some new method of working with materials to create some new product. In that case, matter is what the engineers or scientists want. And the rest of us? Well, we can go about our business and let the engineers and scientists work out what matter is.

But there is another definition of matter. Matter is that which has meaning. In this sense, matter has meaning because it is meaningful.

The poets have long been aware of this other definition of matter. The best poems often begin with a statement like ‘this world is strange’. They tell us that things do not necessarily behave as we expect them to. They tell us that things have hidden meanings, and we cannot always see what those meanings are. They tell us that everything around us has an aura of mystery about it, that it is a place we don’t understand. This world is strange.