Poetry as Remembrance

John Keats wrote, “Poetry should [...] strike the reader as words from his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.” He elucidates in another text, “The excellency of every art is its intensity.”

Keats’ observations are timeless. The distillation of feeling and “story” is still vivid in the best of contemporary fine arts, performing arts, and literary arts, much as it was thousands of years ago. We need only think of the Epic of Gilgamesh to know that poetry and storytelling were strong within the human race long before written stories came into being. Even a long epic has intensity and distillation of feeling and story. This is literature at its finest and stands abreast of the finest poetry (and prose) today.

What is different from ancient epics is Keats’ notion of poetry as the work of a single poet, a single mind remembering. In past times, poetry was the vehicle for oral history as well as an art form. Epic poetry was created and evolved (a poem is never done, after all) through a community rather than a single person. In that sense this community creation is a much more profound “remembrance” because it is a shared remembrance that contributed to the very culture that carried the poetic story with them over time and place. It is the entire culture that is the poet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poet that I honor as an inspiration for poets like Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth, …, Angelou, Boland, Glück, …, a commitment to taut language, evocative imagery, intensity, remembrance, cadence.

In this sense, the quote from Keats is his own rewriting of the responsibility of poetry that is a contemporary remembrance of poetry’s role since time immemorial.