It was long ago and not so far away when I was editor of The Agon, the annual undergraduate poetry magazine at Albright College. I am not sure how that task fell to me; perhaps I was late for a meeting and was chosen before I arrived.

Poetry was not a popular pursuit, ranking slightly below eating cafeteria food.

Far more attractive were sports, beer and the opposite sex—each of which still are raw materials for much poetry, a great deal of it written on subway or bathroom walls.

Most people took literature survey courses because they were required. I bet few students ever read a poem again or can remember what poet wrote; “Beauty is truth; truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth, and are all ye need to know.”

If you know both the poet and the poem’s title, I am very impressed. If not, go to the end of this column for the answer.

Those of us who drifted to writing or reading poetry were considered campus outcasts. Some of us dressed in black; others spent hours in the cafeteria writing verse on the back of napkins. I have never lost this habit. I often go to a local bookstore where I do my writing. If I don’t like what I write, I simply toss the napkin in the nearest receptacle, something I learned to do when I was a book editor and would receive manuscripts that began, “It was a dark and dreary night.”

I recall these days because recently I came upon an old issue of the college magazine I edited. It was dedicated to David, a young and gifted man who was killed in a motorcycle accident during the school year, whose poetry was featured in the magazine. I shall never forget one of the lines in his poem: “Life is millions of time zones.”

I wonder if he knew something we didn’t— that time is a trick limited only by our lack of imagination.

W.H. Auden, a great poet, wrote, “Poetry makes nothing happen…it survives, a way of happening, a mouth.”

Another poet, the Englishman William Wordsworth, said poetry was simply emotion recollected in tranquility.

Whatever you believe about poetry, when you’re hit by the power of a few words, you’ll know it when you feel it—which means, I believe, that poetry excites the imagination and stirs the soul like no other form of communication.

A great poet stays with you a long time and won’t let go.

Poetry is news that lasts, one artist wrote.

I love that description because it rings so true. News that lasts is news we all know firsthand— such as the birth of a baby or the death of a parent or the first spring daffodils or stopping in the woods on a snowy evening.

Great poetry takes the ordinary and illuminates it so that we know its power. It’s what religion once was before it turned into prose. A rose may be only a rose, but when given to a lover it becomes something full of deep feeling and meaning.

It is unfortunate that we live in times of crass and constant babbling, whether on television or over e-mail systems. We are bombarded with words until they lose any deep connection they might stir in us. We are starved for mystery and wonder and deep feelings of awe, even fear. We crave entertainment but still feel unsatisfied.

“The world is too much with us…for this, for everything, we are out of tune,” Wordsworth wrote.

But every once in a while a word or sentence jumps out and seizes our hearts and won’t let go. It might be Robert Frost’s two roads diverged in a yellow wood or William Butler Yeat’s plea to gather me into the artifice of eternity or David’s image that life is millions of time zones.

There’s poetry in each of us and around us if we would pay attention. That’s what poetry offers: a wake-up call while you still are here. By the way, “Beauty is truth; truth is beauty,” is from “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats.

–The Reverend John C. Morgan,
D.Min ’63 is a former journalist
and retired pastor. He resides in
Muhlenberg Township, Pa.