Poetry Moment

The TS Elliot Prize for poetry was awarded this week by Poet Laureate Andrew Motion to the youngest ever recipient, 30 year old Jen Hadfield. Her collection of poems, representing her life in Scotland and travels around the world, were widely commended.

It’s perhaps a bit early for her to be in the running to take over from Motion when he steps down as poet laureate later this yea. But there is obvious speculation in the literary world as to who will succeed him.

Motion did a poetry reading in my central London church just after his appointment almost a decade ago. He was in top form that evening. It was a stark reminder to me of how popular poetry still is. The place was packed, people were enchanted; poetry is the most under-rated and unexpected form of personal expression.

Wordsworth, who was also poet laureate, remarked that poetry “is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity”. If we are really honest, most of us will have tried to write a poem at some point in our life. However bad it was, it was probably at a moment when all other forms of expression seemed inappropriate or limiting , whilst a poem allowed us a potent personal representation of how I feel about this or that person or situation, right now, at this minute.
Here is an essential paradox of a constrained literary form providing new depths of freedom of expression.

That’s why the connection between poetry and what I do or don’t believe is so obvious. The struggle to believe, the understand, to love is an essentially personal one shared, along the way, with other human beings. Biblical scholars generally agree that the Hebrew poetry of the Old Testament can generally be divided into two broad categories: the liturgical or cultic poems, written to be said with other people as part of sharing life’s experience and the wisdom poems which are intensely personal and which reflect depth, joy, pain, uncertainty.

I spent quite a bit of time yesterday looking at poems which are so far only published on the internet. And it is quite clear that in an age of blogging, personal opinion, self expression, poetry is an exciting and creative option for us to try to explain how we are feeling and what we believe.

Faith in poetry throughout the centuries is tribute enough to its enduring and sparkling qualities. In these challenging and uncertain times, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s still urges us towards “That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith”; and poetic faith knows no bounds despite natural constraints.