Poets and Society
On January 20, 2021, Joseph R. Biden was inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States of America. It was a historic moment after a tumultuous year of divisive election campaigns and mass protests all over the country. Many Americans and people worldwide had been looking forward to the day as the beginning of recovery from the previous four fractious years. The event was highlighted by speeches, the singing of the national anthem and other patriotic songs, and prayers. But the performance that stole everyone’s heart and brought the audience emotionally closer was the recitation by the young poet Amanda Gorman. Below, we quote from her long poem, “The Hill We Climb.”
We are striving to forge a union with purpose,
to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and
conditions of man.
And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us,
but what stands before us.
We close the divide because we know, to put our future first,
we must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms
so we can reach out our arms
to one another.
What she said had been said by others, too. But the poetic form of the message coming directly from the young poet herself had an electrifying impact. The event demonstrated what psychologist Merlin Donald had said long ago, “Art is an activity intended to influence the mind of an audience.”[i]
The Roman emperor Augustus Caesar knew the power of poetry. His reign (27 BCE to 14 CE) is generally regarded as the golden period of Roman history. It was a time of economic prosperity and great cultural accomplishments. The crown jewels of Rome’s cultural achievements were the works of its great poets. The emperor had the equivalent of a minister for culture, whose responsibility was to recruit talent for the service of the state. That is how the poet Virgil came into Augustus’s orbit. Virgil was born in the countryside in northern Italy. He wrote nostalgic poems about the idyllic country life of his youth, which endeared him to Roman poetry lovers. Augustus had been encouraging the wealthy Romans to invest in agriculture and repopulate the countryside, so he saw potential in Virgil’s popular poems. With the emperor’s encouragement and financial support, Virgil produced many more such poems, extolling the virtues of agriculture and village life. But a new idea would soon come to the emperor’s mind that would catapult Virgil to immortality.
Augustus dreamed of giving Rome a lasting myth that would make its citizens proud of their heritage. He wanted that myth to be enshrined in an epic of Homeric proportions, and he selected Virgil for this task. The poet picked Aeneid, a heroic character in Homer’s epics, as his protagonist. After the Trojan War, Aeneid fled devastation and mass killing to embark on a long journey, taking his ailing father and son with him. He traveled by land and sea, first reaching Carthage, where he stayed for a while before settling in Italy. In Vergil’s depiction, Aeneid’s supreme virtue is not his fighting skills or bravery but his willingness to accept hardship as a caring son and a responsible father, the qualities Augustus wanted to see in every Roman. Aeneid is also a man of uncompromising moral virtues. Virgil cleverly introduced Rome’s legendary heroes, Romulus and Remus, into Aeneid’s family line, thus harmonizing the two myths in one national story. Virgil died before finishing The Aeneid, but even the unfinished epic was an overwhelming success with the Romans.
Nearly a thousand years after Virgil, a Persian poet was given a similar task. He was to weave together myth and history to create a glorious vision of the past for the Iranian people. The poet was Ferdowsi, whose epical work, Shahnameh, has long been regarded as the most outstanding literary achievement in the Persian language. The Iranian people at that time were spread over a vast region in Central Asia, extending from today’s Georgia in the west to Tajikistan in the east and Uzbekistan in the north to the shores of the Persian Gulf in the south. Ferdowsi’s epic gave these people something to rally around.
The influence of poets has shrunk in the modern days, and other forms of literature have taken over much of the space poetry once occupied. But poets still find an audience when society needs a clarion call. From Ireland to Bangladesh, poets inspired their nations at historical moments; like Amanda Gorman, they come to the fore at times of change. During Germany’s national awakening in the 19th century, Ernst Moritz Arndt, a professor, poet, writer, and nationalist leader, wrote “The German Fatherland” in 1813.
Where is the German’s fatherland?
Then name, oh, name the mighty land!
Wherever is heard the German tongue,
And German hymns to God are sung!
This is the land, thy Hermann’s land;
This, German, is thy fatherland.
Times have changed, and poems like Arndt’s may sound too parochial to the 21st century’s multicultural audience. The pressing problems of the time—the environment, inequality, and violence—need global unity. We need to think in terms of one world. Here again, poetry may have a role. The American poet Honestly J.T. has a message for this new world:
One World
Love is not a color,
No hue, neither a race.
If we help our sisters and brothers,
There’s a bond that we’ll share.
[J.T. Honestly, “One World”. His poems are available online at Poetry Soup: https://www.poetrysoup.com/poem/one_world_494988]
End Notes:
[i] Merlin Donald; “Art and Cognitive Evolution”, in The Artful Mind, edited by Mark Turner, Oxford University Press, 2006