Terry Eagleton’s illuminating new book attempts to make poetry accessible to all. Here he begins a series of columns for Books on this subject — this week, asking why poetry is so feared and misunderstood. In following weeks, he will look at metre, rhyme, rhythm, tone, mood, syntax, texture and imagery

Poetry is the most intimidating of all the literary arts. Even students of literature tends to give it a wide berth these days, preferring a rattling good Conradian yarn to the perils of Paradise Lost. Most could spot a sexist stereotype in a poem, but not many could pick out an example of bathos or understatement. This is not because they are obtuse. It is because a lot of their teachers, not least the younger generation of them, couldn’t either. Poetry is rapidly becoming the bad fairy at the literary ball. And good poetry criticism among students is becoming as rare as clog dancing.

This is curious, as Britain is stuffed from end to end with bad amateur poets. But poets are not usually the most avid fans of poetry criticism. The more precious suspect that critics are soulless, white-coated technicians out to dissect their spiritual innards. Poets are Dionysians, great shaggy-haired beasts full of raw libidinal energy; critics are Apollonians — sad, buttoned-down creatures whose relation to poets is like a eunuch’s to the sultan.

Why is poetry so scary? One answer is that it mobilises the full resources of human language, and this is clearly something we not do everyday. Most of us use the phrase “How do you do?” from time to time, but few of us are aware that it consists of a series of staccato, evenly stressed monosyllables with three internal rhymes and a pararhyme.

This kind of observation isn’t quite as useless as it seems. When Dwight D. Eisenhower was running for the US presidency, one of the most eminent literary critics of the 20th century, Roman Jakobson, demonstrated by a microscopically close verbal analysis exactly why the slogan “I like Ike” had the positive effect that it did on voters.

On the whole, however, it is best not to get too sucked in to such analysis in everyday life. When someone shouts “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, only those of us who get paid for doing so might stop to linger over the way that the stabbing emphasis of the “F” consonant, followed by the long-drawn out wail of the vowels, mimicks the motion of the fire itself, from its explosive beginning to the whoosh of its spreading. Most people are just busy leaping from the circle into the stalls.

Any everyday utterance can be treated as a piece of poetry. A milkman with a literary education might notice that the note on the doorstep reading “two skimmed, two semi-skimmed and one full cream” is an iambic pentameter. Too much of this verbal sensitivity would bring daily life grinding to a halt. If you want a thriving economy, it is best not to have too many poetry critics around.

In ordinary speech, we treat language as transparent, whereas poetry treats it as opaque. Rather than just stare through the language to its meaning, it savours words as a value in themselves. In fact, poetry is that strange kind of utterance in which such things as tone, mood, rhythm, rhyme, pitch, pace and texture are part of the meaning. It is the kind of language that makes it impossible for us to separate what is said from how it is said. There are several ways to say “I think I’ll have the one with the squashy centre”, but only one of saying “Thou still unravished bride of quietness”.

The closest analogy to the poet is the infant. Poets are regressive creatures who have never got over the sensual thrills of babbling. While mature men and women use language to buy shares and wage wars, poets love to relish the shape and flavour of words on the tongue — what Seamus Heaney calls “mouth music”. Poetry is a kind of primitive magic, in which words and things share a secret bond. In fact, it pushes words to the point where they are things — not just abstract tokens, but palpable experiences.

Whereas civilised types stare through the window of language to the world beyond, poets are fascinated by the pattern of dents and scratches on the windowpane, and by the cool feel of the glass on the fingerpads.

Such fascination is hard to sustain in the modern age — another reason why so many people are nervous of poetry. In commercial, bureaucratic societies such as our own, language grows increasingly stale and abstract. Words become worn and tarnished, like coins passed too often from hand to hand. People who talk about the co-ordinated delivery of best-practice solutions for the dynamic enablement of cost-effective projects are poetic virgins. They have clearly never thrilled to the lilt and texture of a sentence in their lives. The task of poetry is to bring a moribund language alive again in the minds and mouths of its users.

How to Read a Poem is published by Blackwell

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