In a time of crisis, poetry nourishes and gives focus
Recently, I was reading John Burnside’s The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century. It’s a good book, combining personal reminiscence and intensive reflection on works by poets as various as Siegfried Sassoon, Marina Tsvetaeva, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marianne Moore, Eugenio Montale, William Matthews and Haki R. Madhubuti, among many others. Throughout,
Burnside argues that 20th-century poetry matters because it continually interacts with contemporary social conditions and political crises, with what he calls — borrowing the phrase from Osip Mandelstam — “the noise of time.”
In effect, poetry “aims in every possible way to reaffirm the world that we actually inhabit, in all its vital, messy, beautiful, tragic reality. It is not so much the case that poetry makes nothing happen” — those last four words derive from W.H. Auden’s elegy for W.B. Yeats — “as that it attempts to reveal what is already happening, to offer a context to events and so propose a means by which the noise of time can be re-experienced as the music of what happens.”
Burnside quotes well and regularly and imaginatively frames his arguments around the most poetic of philosophical catchphrases, including “All that is solid melts into air” (Marx and Engels, echoing Shakespeare), “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” (Wittgenstein) and “Nothingness haunts being ” (Sartre). While Burnside mainly looks at work written in response to injustice, war and grief, his examples tend to be comparatively sophisticated, as one would expect from a distinguished poet and a teacher at the University of St. Andrews.
Still, most of us turn to sentimental
verse when confronting adversity or seeking comfort. Kipling’s oft-quoted poem If has inspired generations with its tribute to character and endurance.
As Burnside writes, poetry “nourishes us, it contributes to our grieving and our healing processes, it gives focus to our loves and to our fears, allowing us to sing them, at the back of our minds, in a deliberate and disciplined transformation of noise into music, of grief into acceptance, of anger at pointless destruction into a determination to save at least something of what remains.”