We need poetry more and more

In 1975 the great poet Eugenio Montale received the Nobel Prize for Literature. During the award ceremony he focused his speech on a fundamental question: "Is poetry still possible?".

Montale's reflection started from the awareness that art was increasingly becoming an object of consumption in the affluent society of the second half of the twentieth century. Every artistic expression, including poetry, was losing its identity also because according to the great poet the mass media, in particular television, were on the verge of destroying any possibility of solitude and reflection.

Almost fifty years after Montale's speech we find ourselves in a society that is probably even more anti-poetic . We are, in fact, bombarded by fast and bombastic communication, synthetic because it is the result of haste and the desire to be understood immediately, without effort. We live in a world where technology and finance dominate, where everything must have a practical, productive purpose and must be able to be monetised. “Carmina non dant panem” the ancients already maintained, poems do not earn bread, indeed often they do not earn money at all. And this makes them the most anti-modern there can be in today's world. So even at school we now think above all about providing skills, abilities, skills to put it full of English.

Yet, there is still room for poetry , because there is a great need for poetry in a world like today's, so practical and aimed towards results. Poetry continues to be, as the great English poet of the early nineteenth century Shelley said, "something divine, the center and circumference of knowledge, it is that which includes all the sciences and to which all the sciences refer." In a definition of this type we recognize - it is almost obvious to say - Nicola Crocetti, "the editor of poets", founder of the magazine "Poesia", which has published thousands of poems from every corner of the globe, and Davide Brullo, poet, founder of the adventure magazine “Pangea”.

To their courage and their abnegation towards rhymes and verses we owe a work that has probably never been attempted before: " Tell me a verse, my soul " (Crocetti Editore, 2023, pp. 1260), an anthology of abnormal and passionate universal poetry . volume, as Davide Brullo writes in the introductory notes, which is not intended to be simply a book, but " a fire, an act of love ".

An act of love that brings together compositions ranging from the Vedas to today's poets, from ancient Egyptian hymns to Eugenio Montale, Seamus Heaney, Paul Celan, from the biblical psalms and from Sappho to Ezra Pound, Yves Bonnefoy and Mario Luzi. The intent of the two curators is not critical, much less compilation: it is a leap into the lyrical wonder of every country and every time, a journey into surprise and confusion. The anthology aims, in fact, to be a sort of Arabian Nights of world opera.

It is therefore not reading for "experts", but for the inspired; for those who find comfort in curiosity and the drive to probe their own soul between the meshes of a sonnet or a song. Poetry, as we know, is a risk and an antidote: reading it today is a gesture of smiling subversion . Because we need poetry to rediscover the strength to influence, to create elevated feelings that drive away the skepticism, cynicism and, worst of all, the nihilism that surrounds us. We need it to escape from reality without forgetting it, to let ourselves go to dreams, illusions and utopias that can allow us to try to make the world we live in better.

The art of the poet, in fact, is that faculty that can restore youth to a time, ours besieged by its fears, its insecurities. As the writer Giorgio Bassani wrote in the essay "From a prison" (published in the 1984 volume Beyond the Heart): «Poetry belongs to virgin souls, to angels, to those who believe. Naturally we no longer live at the age of 'Homer, and therefore it is difficult for us to find something to believe in. But in any case, to be poets we must return to a necessary condition of naivety." A young, or rather childish, naivety, because poetry helps the heart and the mind not to age badly . Poetry helps to try and try again, even when the result is not certain, or rather especially when it is not certain and everything seems to be going against you. It helps to look forward, without worrying too much about trifles and to accept, with Leopardian awareness " how sweet it is to me to be shipwrecked in this sea". This is why we still have such a need for poetry.