Poetry Makes Us Better Persons

           Plato aptly comments: “For the poet is a winged and a holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired…” We should  understand the pulse of the greatest modern and 21st century poets in our language.. Poetry alone can make us better persons. According to Sir Philip Sidney, the poet is a better moral teacher than a historian and a philosopher. Poetry is “the center and circumference of knowledge”, and the poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” The greatest poems  show the subtle sense of mystery, beauty, grandeur of nature, a great interest in humanity, and love for the elemental simplicities of life. We find here not only a wonderful and heightened imagination, but also a rich style and a variety of melodies along with incomparable music.

             The question arises how the modern poets have been able to transcend the hollowness of social system and the terrible storms of violence and terrorism endangering the very survival of mankind. Several poets to escape from the sad dreariness, the fear of ‘nuclear winter’ and the widespread violence, withdraw “from outer experience to concentrate on the inner.” The horrors, the death of beauty, and the maddening strife of the violent crowd compel these poets to search the unknown and the strange things. This creates a beautiful feeling of wonder and mystery in their poems. The most distinguishing feature of such poets sis their extraordinary imaginative power. By their intense imagination, they are able to discover the mystery of things. The poems by T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound  successfully explore the deepest emotions of the soul. Most of their poems  reveal a remarkable dreamy grace and subtle suggestion.

                Moreover, the greatest  poets are endowed with the eye of an artist. They avoid the obsolete or worn-out words. Pater aptly comments: “All art is in the long run only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within.” The charm of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.B.Yeats, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender poets lies partly in the “maturity, manifested in technique, of feeling in relation to thought, of imagination and desire in relation to actuality” (F. R.Leavis).