"If [people] don’t need poetry, then bully for them,” the American poet Frank O’Hara once famously said. Poetry isn’t for everyone, not everyone needs it and not everyone deserves it. Yet as a poet, you’re still sometimes asked: “Is poetry still relevant?”

Whenever I hear this question, I feel the one really being asked is: “Is contemporary poetry of interest to lots of people?” And we know that’s not the case. Poetry is a specialist thing, and always has been. But is it relevant, or appropriate, or important? All these things are contingent. It’s relevant to people who like it and find something in it. Is it relevant to their mental wellbeing, their jobs, their identity, or sex, or income bracket? Well, maybe to all of those things, or maybe to none. If you’ve ever read a poem and it stirred something in you, if you’ve ever responded to a particular arrangement of words, then I’d say you found it “relevant”.

In the hierarchy of needs, of course, people don’t need poetry. They need clean water before they need a sonnet. But after those animalistic needs are supplied, what is left is art and community. For me, poetry is the most interesting of the arts, and also a means to form community. It is a way to commit to what’s deepest in our lives and to most fully inhabit ourselves. Ted Hughes said it’s about “trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life”, and I’ve always liked that.

I was a lawyer for many years, and when you’re a lawyer you only see a client when something has gone wrong. And it’s the same for the poet – many people don’t think of poetry until something big happens, and then they call in the professionals, as it were. They go to the anthology and look up a love poem to send to the person they’re in love with, or in grief, find a poem about death to capture something of what they’re feeling. I’m often asked to recommend poems for funerals, and the elegy is a very old form that people have used for thousands of years. We seek companionship in grief through words. We turn to poetry at the junctures of our lives when our feelings need to be articulated but we don’t necessarily have the right words.

People like to make a lot of the Auden quote “poetry makes nothing happen”, which of course is true in many ways. But in other ways, it’s not true at all, and Auden knew that. The line comes from “In Memory of WB Yeats”, and later on in the elegy he talks about poetry being “a way of happening”, so he himself was in two minds about it, and I think we all are.

And what does “relevant” even mean? Its origin is a Scots legal term meaning “legally pertinent”, but people use it a lot these days when discussing art or books: “Oh, it’s not relevant” – the addendum being, “to me. I don’t see myself in it.” I believe that misunderstands the nature of art. There’s both a narcissism and a fear in the word “relevant” when used in this way.

Often, people have a response to poetry that isn’t founded in familiarity with poetry, but there are many ways into it and many routes through it. I think everybody should be doing it. It needs only pen and a piece of paper – it’s a democratic pursuit. With all its complications – its mix of imagination and emotion, thought and experience, with all of its humour or its deadly seriousness – poetry is the best method I’ve found to engage in making meaning of life. 

Nick Laird, Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry and recipient of the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem for “Up Late”, was in conversation with Victoria James.

For events, writing workshops and all things literary at the heart of Queen’s, visit qub.ac.uk/schools/seamus-heaney-centre/