Poetry: Priceless.

April is National Poetry Month, and in its honor, I’d like to share some thoughts on the topic.

At the close of the Civil War, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois argued its importance. Washington felt it (I paraphrase) a luxury, as it could not feed the body, and DuBois felt it gave the soul the reason for feeding the body.

Long treatises have been written about the form and function and nature of poetry. Edgar Allen Poe felt that the most poignant poetic subject was the death of a beautiful young woman, as told by her bereaved lover.

The romantics thought poetry expressed man’s essential imaginations, capturing truth at its purest level. Shelley, in his essay “Defense of Poetry,” contrasts poetry to narrative, where time, he says, distorts things and makes them ugly. Poetry, on the other hand, "is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”

Poetry was, in many ways, born of practicality. Before the invention of the printing press, poetry was the news and entertainment of its time. Its rhyme and repetition were mnemonic devices that let people memorize and recite its stories, its truths, its expressions. The greatest and oldest works of literature--Beowulf, the Iliad, much of the Bible--are in verse forms.

The word itself derives from an ancient Greek word meaning “I create.” Thus a poet is a creator--the poem, the creation.

In the 21st century, poetry seems to have become superfluous, an unnecessary adornment, the latest advertising jingle.

Has “creation” thus fallen by the wayside? And with it beauty--even truth?

Poetry, no matter its form, or its function, exerts an undeniable power on those who experience it. If you don’t believe me, ask yourself: What is this little ditty I can’t get out of my head?