Poetry and emotional intelligence

I was pondering, as I posted those poems earlier, that the poems I like best, that move and interest me most, are those about the inner lives of we people. I like poems about nature, and poems about almost anything, as well, but they simply don’t arrest me like poems about what goes on inside the hearts and minds of humans do. So, it was then interesting to read this blurb by Norman MacCaig about why he writes poetry and what he sees to be the usefulness of poetry.

If your parents and your grandparents, way back, all had red hair, it’s likely yours will blaze away in the ancestral manner. But heredity doesn’t seem to work with artists. Usually only one perches singing in his genealogical tree (though think of the incredible Bach family, an orchestra in themselves). As far as I know, I’m the only MacCaig ever to have committed poetry.

Everybody likes to make something, something that never existed before, whether it’s a chair, a sand-pie, or a poem. I don’t know what makes one man produce a poem and another man a chair; but I‘m sure the creative instinct behind their activities is the same. If I made a chair, pity whoever would sit in it; and if the chairmaker produced a poem it would let you down too. But we’re up to the same thing. If the creative processes that result in a poem are mysterious, they’re no more mysterious that those that produce a chair. Their aim is to make something at once beautiful and useful.

Useful? It’s easy to see that chairs come in handy. But what use is poetry?

It trains, educates, extends the range of our sensibility, as science and technology train the intellect. That’s to say, the arts induce us to respond to and examine the emotional significance as well as the rational significance of whatever comes under our notice, and to have unexamined emotional responses is as much a sign of immaturity as to have unexamined beliefs. Now, an adult physique with the intelligence of a child is looked after. It might, some day, put an axe in somebody’s skull. An adult intelligence with the emotional equipment of a child is just as dangerous: maybe more.