It’s World Poetry Day, but you wouldn’t know it. No mention in the newspapers; no emails; not even any doggerel has crossed my desk. This is a travesty, because poetry makes things happen. I disagree with W. H. Auden who wrote, in his poem ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’, that “poetry makes nothing happen”. Of course, Auden didn’t really believe it, spending his life penning some of the most moving short poems of the 20th Century. Eventually, after a long time far, far away, Auden returned late in life to a form of Christian faith, at which point he revised a lot of his poetry. Obviously, he thought it worth doing because poetry does in fact have an impact on minds, hearts and lives.

Les Murray, the great Australian Christian poet, knows this. He talks about Wholespeak, which is the kind of language that pulls together ideas, images, experiences, memories, feelings, history, projections, observations into an aesthetic form with some sort of integrity—and we call that a poem. This is a great definition of poetry, but I still like the one offered by a cricket commentator who, after reading on air a poem that delighted him, announced, “That’s a top poem! Top words in a top order!” Not a bad definition of poetry.

A poem like Dante’s 14th Century Divine Comedy changed the way the world thinks about cosmology, justice and punishment.

A poem like Milton’s 17th Century Paradise Lost helped to shape the modern understanding of human capacity for good and evil.

A poem like T.S. Eliot’s 20th Century The Waste Land defined the modern era of moral confusion and malaise about human progress.

The Bible, of course, is full of world-changing poems, from the opening chapter (Genesis 1), to Psalm 23 about God as a Good Shepherd, to the brief, hymn-like verses of 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, which records the earliest formulation of Christian beliefs. From the erotic verse of Song of Songs, to the startling prophetic verses of judgement and woe, to the overwhelming ‘songs’ of the apocalypse: “Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered/to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might/and honour and glory and blessing!” (Revelation 5:12).

In fact, the Bible itself might be thought of as a large Poem, holding together as it does from the accounts of creation, through the epic events of Israel’s history, to the brief cosmos-altering life of Jesus, through to the vision of a new heaven and earth in the Book of Revelation. It’s Wholespeak, Murray might say.

Happy World Poetry Day!

N.B. Murray defends poetry here, first in prose but finally with a poem!