Poem of the year

By Ian McDonald

Good poems are instantly recognizable. They startle, shock new life into old ideas, impress on the mind patterns of beauty and truth previously unnoticed. Often, as John Keats wrote, they “strike the reader as the wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”

Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet, whose piercingly clear collection of essays The Redress of Poetry I like to re-read, writes that WH Auden’s elegy for Yeats was “a rallying cry that celebrates poetry for being on the side of life, and continuity of effort, and enlargement of the spirit.” Heaney believes that one function of poetry is to act as a counterweight to hostile and oppressive forces in the world; he calls this “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.” This is what he calls “redress,” whereby “the poetic imagination seems to redress whatever is wrong or exacerbating in the prevailing conditions,” offering “a response to reality which has a liberating and verifying effect upon the individual spirit… tilting the scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium…This redressing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances.”

I believe that is finely put. I am convinced about a good poem’s value as “a glimpsed alternative” to so much in the world that is a denial of enlightened humanity. But at the end of the day what I get most out of good poetry is pleasure, pure enjoyment in what Coleridge called “the best words in the best order,” a feeling of intense contentment and lasting satisfaction that I have discovered a perfect expression in words of some fact about the world or feeling or thought which, once I have experienced it, there seems no other way it could have been written or said, an inevitable achievement of the human imagination to be savoured and remembered……