My sophomore year of college, I reluctantly enrolled in “Modern
Poetry.” It was required for all English
majors. Obviously. It was also the only class I had dreaded: I’d always found poetry—the kind written by real poets—to be hazy and nebulous, and
had never been able to penetrate what seemed a special, secret language found
in poetry.
When the class started, I learned the poetry we would study wasn’t
“modern” at all, but rather a study of very un-modern poetry. The most “modern” poet on the syllabus was
sixty years dead.
Okay, then, I
thought. Whatever.
The point, I discovered, was to show us the progression of
poetry over time, and how it influenced poets who were writing in more modern
times.
So: We started with Beowulf, then made a multi-century jump
to John Keats, then spent time with Ralph Waldo Emerson, then Walt Whitman,
Emily Dickenson, and W.B. Yeats.
Studying these greats, I finally understood. These poets!
So, so good! Some of their
one-liners were breathtaking, in the literal sense: I would read a line, stop, breathe, not
breathe, think, and re-read. These
lines, written some 200 years earlier, spoke to me. Me. A scrappy but lost college
girl who was trying to manage college and a looming life.
I now recognize that I connected so thoroughly with these
poets because of their simple way to encapsulate something real, something
true, and something universal that everyone
can understand. In fact, I now identify
my connection with these poets as the beginning of my ongoing love affair with
quotes.
Many—most?—people love quotes. They speak to us. They are simple, one-line zingers that
capture a collective reality, something we’ve all felt or can understand. We hear a quote, and we think, Yes!
We think, Someone understands. We think, See? I’m not alone.
Let’s go back to the original masters, the ones that spoke
to me so many years ago from the pages of a Modern Poetry textbook.
Yeats:
Think
like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
Do
not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
And say my glory was I
had such friends.
Emily Dickenson:
Hope
is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes
without the words - and never stops at all.
If
I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.
Forever
is composed of nows.
Emerson:
To
be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is
the greatest accomplishment.
Do
not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a
trail.
For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty
seconds of peace of mind.
Right? Those words? Those thoughts? How something said a century ago can still apply to us, today, here, now?
I imagine these expert poets, penning these truths so long ago, with
charcoal and ink-dipped pen. And still, here, today, they speak to us with their essential truths. We still share them, pin them, post them, and
Tweet them. And most of all, in this modern
world of ours, we learn from them.
