Loss of a Vital Skill
Reviving Our Fluency in Poetic Language
As I was walking up the stairs of Jabal Amman hill, I met some thistle-gatherers. Amman, Jordan, where I live, is a city of hills—to get anywhere you have to walk up and down hundreds of steps—and beside this particular flight of steps, in a steep little vacant lot, a man and a woman were gathering weeds. I paused and called out over the stairway-wall, “What are you gathering?”
They both smiled broadly, and the man walked over to the wall. “Khorfeysh!” he told me, holding up a leaf of milk thistle. Deftly—with bare fingers—he stripped off the prickly leaf-blade and proffered the midrib to me. “Try it!”
I took the midrib from his hand and bit into it. It was crisp and juicy, and tasted like spring. The introduction made, we talked a bit. I learned that they were not local Jordanians, but Druze from Syria—foreigners, like me.
That story probably seems quaint, perhaps exotic—which is a bit odd, when you think about it. After all, there are weeds everywhere, many of them edible. There are strangers everywhere, many of them interesting. But the story feels quaint because, usually, we don’t put weeds in our mouths, and we don’t talk to strangers.
Estranged from the Natural World
It hasn’t always been so. Our generation—perhaps especially my generation, Gen Z and younger Millennials—are cut off both from each other and from the natural world around us. And of course, quite a few social commentators are worried that this is hurting us. For one thing, there is an undeniable mental health crisis right now among teens and young adults in America. Beyond that, many conservatives are arguing that we are so dead as a culture that we can’t even create good art anymore. In an essay published in the New York Times in December 2022, entitled “Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month,” Matthew Walther makes the case that we have stopped writing good poetry because we can’t—we are estranged from the natural world, which was the bedrock of the premodern imagination, and have only machines and garbage with which to furnish our own imaginations.
Walther says that as a result of this estrangement, we often can barely comprehend even the basic meaning of older poems. (What is a “woodbine,” anyway?) He marks the publication in 1922 of “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot as the death-date of poetry, because that famous poem encapsulated the spiritual fragmentation of modern industrial society, which renders us incapable of writing or even understanding good poetry.
If true, this is not a trivial problem. Poetic use of language is central to many forms of art, including songs and stories. If we can’t comprehend the art of the past, we are sprigs cut off from our cultural roots, and we may be doomed to wither. If art is dead, it is a symptom of a greater cultural death.
This reminds me of a C. S. Lewis poem, “The Future of Forestry,” which begins:
How will the legend of the age of trees
Feel, when the last tree falls in England?
When the concrete spreads and the town conquers
The country’s heart; when contraceptive
Tarmac’s laid where farm has faded,
Tramline flows where slept a hamlet,
And shop-fronts, blazing without a stop from
Dover to Wrath, have glazed us over?
Simplest tales will then bewilder
The questioning children, “What was a chestnut?
Say what it means to climb a Beanstalk.
Tell me, grandfather, what an elm is.
What was Autumn? They never taught us.”
This is without doubt a civilizational destination to avoid. But have we already arrived there? Is it already too late? Walther seems to think so, at least as far as the appreciation of poetry is concerned. He grimly opines: “For my part, I have an easier time conceiving of a world socialist utopia than I do a revival of poetry in English. For poetry to reappear, the muses would have to return from wherever they fled after we banished them.”
A Profound & Deadly Change
Daniel Witt is a writer and English teacher living in Amman, Jordan.
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