“Portrait of Keats,” Joseph Severn

These are dark times for those who think the humanities, and the study of poetry in particular, are at the core of the mission of higher education. 

With the current focus on providing what looks like immediate practical training for finding careers, many, including some in the upper reaches of the administration here at OU, appear to think of poetry as an afterthought, something that some students might want to study, but certainly not something that should serve as the foundation of our educational system. 

Current programs like the OU Pledge, which promises “to provide undergraduate students with opportunities for meaningful, hands-on learning,” are based on the assumption that students need “practical,” education to prepare them for careers. This is how OU’s webpage expands the definition of “meaningful, hands-on learning: “This commitment seeks to enhance academic knowledge with experience-based learning such as internships, research and/or community engagement opportunities, empowering our students to make substantive professional contributions.”

I don’t object to experiential, hands-on learning. In our current world, we should do what we can to prepare our students to thrive in careers and elsewhere. In fact, I’ve been incorporating assignments that take my students out of the classroom for decades. 

My objection is that in its current state, the Pledge makes it sound like the primary purpose of college is job-training. It defines “meaningful hands-on learning” so narrowly that it deprives students of what should be the core of their education. In every meeting I’ve attended that discussed the pledge, I’ve argued that reading poetry is the best kind of “meaningful, hands-on learning.” Students hold books in their hands and discuss how meaning is created. 

Mostly, these comments provoke polite laughter, if not outright dismissal. I don’t think it’s a laughing matter. I’m dead serious.

Recently, I was reminded why poetry matters.

Early in the morning of September 19, while I was finishing my morning run, I was struck by a car in a well-lit crosswalk. There are many details of that incident I don’t remember, like why I was in a crosswalk at the same time as a car going some 40. In some ways, as people keep telling me, it’s a good thing I can’t remember. Our brain protects us from revisiting traumas that will retraumatize us. I can accept that, but it is also true that not knowing has been particularly distressing for me.

I sustained multiple fractures — ribs, pelvis, knee — as well as other serious injuries. It didn’t take long for me to realize I was lucky to be alive, like those people who call themselves lucky because they salvaged a few photographs from the wreckage of their homes after a fire or hurricane. 

Among my first memories, thoughts I remember in the aftermath was gratitude because I got to be with my family (especially the three precious grandchildren), and my dear friends, many of whom are my colleagues here on campus. I actually went through some kind of list — like a flash line up of faces.

In the midst of the what seemed like the wreckage of my life, I resisted the advice to back out ofmy teaching so I could focus on my recovery. I was right to do so. While I hate teaching on Zoom, I insisted I could teach my class remotely from my hospital bed. It was one of the best decisions I have made. The class has been a lifeline to me. Those precious students will never know how much they have contributed to my recovery.

I’m only just beginning to understand how dark these last weeks have been for me. My time in the hospital was strange and confusing—I was unable to sleep and distraught at the recurring hallucinations that were both obviously absurd and utterly real. 

I’ve come to realize that poetry also helped my recovery. I found myself in the middle of the night composing poems about commodes and urinals in an effort to make sense of the abyss of humiliation I fell into because I wasn’t able to manage my bodily functions on my own. Being stuck in bed and relying on others to manage the most basic things was more devastating to my sense of myself than I was aware.

Not long ago in our class, we read John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.” In this poem, Keats is sitting under a plum tree near his friend’s home when he hears a nightingale sing. This triggers a long meditation on the pains of being mortal. The poem poses and rejects several solutions, including getting drunk on a kind of literary-infused alcohol, and finding escape through the imagination. Both are inadequate. 

Then, he considers another unsettling possibility: death. “Darkling, I listen,” he says as if we are there in dark with him, “for many a time/ I have been half in love with easeful Death.” This notion made more sense to me the day we read it in class than it ever had. Keats describes having called Death “soft names” urging him to take away his “quiet breath.” The prospect of death with “no pain” while the nightingale is “pouring forth” its “soul” in “such an ecstasy” seemed “rich to him.” And then he pauses—so much of what makes literature vital is caught up in its ability to make us pause. 

If he were to die, even peacefully, the nightingale would continue to sing, but not for him: his ears would be “vain” or useless. He’d become a sod, a clump of dirt and grass, unable to hear its beauty.

Darkling as I was in that bed, I’d never come to the point of calling on Death to take my life, but talking about that stanza with my students struck a new chord for me. Even now, as I write about this, my eyes well up with tears. 

Those who know me will chuckle at this, because tears come pretty easily to me. But this time, those tears signaled something different. My response to the poem suggested that something was at work in me I wasn’t aware of, something I couldn’t quite name. 

No small part of that work was that Keats was helping me grasp something I had been wondering: what makes dealing with “the weariness, the fever, and the fret” worth the struggle?

Keats’ answer is beauty. In the poem, he identifies beauty with the song of the nightingale. I’ve never seen the European nightingale in person. I’ve watched and listened to countless YouTube videos of nightingales and their songs. I’ve even played them in my classes as we discuss the poem. 

They are beautiful, but they are no match for Keats. What the beauty of Keats’s poetry does for me that nightingales can’t is to tap into things going on in my psyche that I can’t quite recognize. 

Reading and rereading poetry gives me strength. It provides a space where I can pause to work through the fact that while I am recovering, I am dying with the rest of us.

As I’ve said, many in our society, even in our university, don’t value poetry and the humanities because they don’t think it produces value. Imagine approaching Keats’ “Ode” through an AI summary or analysis. How would the beauty work its magic in us? In these dark times, I’ve taken to explaining to my students that learning to read poetry helps them develop intellectual habits that will be useful to them as they search for and succeed in their careers. 

I urge them to be confident that the analytical and critical thinking skills they develop in reading poetry will assist them in their efforts to find and succeed in careers. These things are true. Many studies confirm this. I fear, however, that when I make the case for the profitability of poetry, I do poetry a disservice. Framing it in terms of the market demeans it. Poetry’s value transcends the market.

I don’t have time here to explain what beauty is, or what makes poetry beautiful (it sounds good; it feels good in the mouth; it escapes our efforts to define it, to convert it into practical uses, even while it moves us and urges us to return to it). What I really want them to see is that poetry is beautiful. 

And being beautiful, it takes on a life of its own inside us. It feeds into unrecognized patterns and stresses, working just below our conscious attention, but informing it, and compelling us to reimagine what we think we know about ourselves and our world. 

Over and above whatever practical benefits reading poetry can give them—poetry is good for life. For us who are “born for death,” as Keats has it, it makes it worth getting up in the morning.