Excerpt from “The White Goddess”, Robert Graves (1948)

April 4, 2008 by Deightine.

From the forward…

‘What is the use or function of poetry nowadays?’ is a question not the less poignant for being defiantly asked by so many stupid people or apologetically answered by so many silly people. The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites. But ‘nowadays’? function and use remain the same: only the application has changed. This was once a warning to man that he must keep in harmony with the family of living creatures among which he was born, by obedience to the wishes of the lady of the house; it is now a reminder that he has disregarded the warning, turned the house upside down by capricious experiments in philosophy, science and industry, and brought ruin on himself and his family. ‘Nowadays’ is a civilization in which the prime emblems of poetry are dishonoured. In which serpent, lion and eagle belong to the circus-tent; ox, salmon and boar to the cannery; racehorse and greyhound to the betting ring; and the sacred grove to the saw-mill. In which the Moon is despised as a burned-out satellite of the Earth and woman reckoned as ‘auxiliary State personnel’. In which money will buy almost anything but truth, and almost anyone but the truth-possessed poet. — Robert Graves, Foreward to “The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth”

Exactly 60 years have passed since that paragraph was originally written and framed. And yet… nothing about it isn’t still true. I find myself wondering what a poet is in this day, is it truly even a profession now? Nobody but the most entrenched in art and writing really know how to handle metaphor, or how to read between the lines. Everyone is so focused on a world of concrete answers now, kneeling at the altar of science and ‘facts’. Nobody says “What if?” anymore unless it is in estimation of a terrorist attack or a drop in the Dow Jones. Perhaps ‘everyone’ is an unfair quantification, but in this case I mean it to be the vast majority of the English speaking world. But then of course I had to define it here because I might offend someone unable to accept that maybe, just -maybe-, I might have used a generalization on purpose.

Such is the world we live in now.. and the poet inside me aches for what all of this time spent focused on concrete is wasting, all of the poetry, song and dreams going to pot; squandered and festering in the minds of creatives afraid to try to share.

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