Exercising our imagination: poetry and the public conversation

Partners:

Poetry is often thought of as strictly personal – Instagram poets have made it their confessional. But poetry was not always preoccupied with the private sphere. In Homeric Greece, it was the recitation of epic poems which first called the communal into existence. In ancient Athens, tragic theatre – poetry produced in a designated place – was a cornerstone of the polis; it was also one of the earliest enactments of the public square. In Shakespeare’s Globe, the public of the early-modern period became synonymous with the audience for his poetic drama. After the slaughter had ceased, the poetry of Wilfred Owen belatedly became the public voice of the First World War.

Far from being confined to the personal, poetry has been more like an axis connecting the public with the private. Neither solely individual nor wholly collective, poetry has often sat as some kind of paradigm between the two.

Perhaps its historic role means that poetry is particularly well-placed to make a further contribution today. (Indeed, the Athenian spirit of poetry is often echoed at spoken-word events today.) But if in the present day we are so polarised and privatised that terms such as ‘general public’ and ‘common reader’ already sound like lost chords, can poetry prompt us to exercise more of our imagination in the quest for a shared culture?

If poetry is charged with re-connecting our public and private aspects, what is it about poetry, specifically, which facilitates this? If less and less people are engaging with poetry (learning it at school or reading it in their own time), are poets merely writing for themselves? Could this task be performed equally well by a variety of expressive media? And what more should poets and their audiences do now, in order for poetry’s transformative role to be fully realised?