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  e e cummings wrote “Birds sing sweeter than books tell how”. If this is the case, I have often wondered why we bother to write books, or poems, at all. Why not just enjoy that snowdrop for what it is, as it is in itself looking at it without responding in words, or even in pictures or paintings or music? Hopkins chose to respond in many ways more inventively than other poets, but he himself spoke of the beauty and value of enjoying the essence of something in its pure state, perhaps without recourse to words or a written response. He called this pure state or essence of things the “inscape” — “All the world is full of inscape”. The actress Imogen Stubbs describes this as “the unified complex of characteristics that gives each thing its uniqueness and that differentiates it from other things”.
  

   Auden famously said that “poetry makes nothing happen”. This makes me recall the Cambndge poetry festival of 1981 when there was a great gathering of poets and intellectuals in the Coin Exchange for a seminar entitled 'What is the use of poetry in a world threatened by nuclear holocaust?’ A number of speakers and poets (including Adrian Mitchell, David Gascoyne and Craig Raine) made statements and read poems, most of which Professor George Steiner angrily dismissed as ‘howlings’. He insisted that no poem or book of poems was going to change the world. “Real poetry”, he said “is more like what the Japanese are writing”. His words have stayed with me ever since, and have made me think.
   

  Perhaps, after all these years, I can agree that much of Japanese poetry has indeed an aesthetic purity (and a spiritual element) which makes it stand out from much of the recent nihilistic and despairing literature of the western world, and which makes it almost rise above the nightmare and slaughter and torture of the last century. But I want to go further, and say that this kind of poetry can make a real difference to our society and, while it may not ‘change the world’, it can make deep change to the way ordinary people live their lives and to the way they value things. Along with aspects of faith or spirituality, poetry — and in particular, haiku poetry - can bring an extra dimension to our lives and consciousness - a depth, for example, or a joy, and a perspective in joy, or a quiet way of contemplating things. This is a dimension which the Russian poet Osip Mandelstarn believed the people need “as much as bread”. And of course there are many poets all over the world who have suffered so much in their struggles with dangerous times to give us all hope, and indeed ‘light’. So it was Odysseus Elytis, the Greek poet and former soldier who won the Nobel Prize in 1979, who said that the duty of the poet is “to cast drops of light into the darkness”.
   

   The word ‘poem’ is just an old Greek term for ‘a making’. The extraordinary variety of what has passed for ‘poetry’ in our own language, and of what has been called “poetry” in other parts of the world, forms what I describe as the vaster rainbow that spans the totality of world cultures. It may be, however, that for most of these “artificers of the world” (Wallace Stevens), the act of composing a poem — either orally or as the written word — is a celebration of our world (of life, experience, creation), and a way of participating in it, and so of turning special moments of experience into memory. A poem can then be a record of emotion and detail observed (the ‘minute particulars’ of Blake), born perhaps out of joy, or respect for the earth, or the quest for spiritual awareness and love, or of course in some cases out of darker and more painful experiences which may have been worked through into a deep sense of perspective, or warning. Like singing a song or doing a sketch or a watercolour, writing a poem may be a celebration of being alive, and of human creativity. It is a taking part in the creativity of God (this could just be a ‘way of speaking’) which Coleridge called ‘the primary imagination’ (“a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM”). Rilke was moved to write: “Look I live. And for what? Neither childhood nor future grows any less in me ... unaccountable being springs up in my heart”.
  

    As T S Eliot used to say, the poet often has a great ‘vision’ of reality he or she wants to share, in the way of Dante, or Langland, Milton and Blake, or in more recent times Pound, and Elytis. However, with the last century came a turning away from ‘grandeur and ‘romanticism’ and ‘the sublime’. We had instead  modernism and  postmodernism, with a more concrete approach, and a more down-to-earth and personal language (though we might remember that Wordsworth himself wanted to use “the language of real men”). Poems tended to have more bite or edge, and could shock. And yet even in that mood of revolt (and both Dada and Surrealism were born out of horror provoked by the years of World War for which the ‘old order' was held responsible), the new poets could still yearn for the spiritual and the sublime, as Eliot did even in The Wasteland, and they could still write about the things that make life worthwhile. The Surrealists themselves continued on ‘the road to the absolute’, but by apparently new methods. Their aim though was really very similar to that of most other poets, including haiku poets. They tried to find ‘the marvellous’ in the ordinary and commonplace things of the world and, as writers do, they wanted to mark ‘the breath of the moment’ by writing poetry.
  

   So although labels can differ, many poets (and haiku poets especially) strive ‘to live more abundantly’, and help us all to do this by way of poetry. It is as if reading and listening to and writing poems can help to make life worth living. It is no accident that the title of Elytis’ own panoramic and large-scale masterpiece, The Axion Esti, has been translated as ‘worthy it is’. And it hardly needs to be said that haiku-poets are similarly inspired, as they write those minimalist breaths which form an essence of pure poetry, a concrete shorthand which hints at the universe and touches in a few brush-strokes the very hub of experience. Many agree that Elytis wrote “a metaphysics of light”. I suspect that haiku poets do something comparable, and “touch our hearts with just a few words”.
   

   Nietzsche, who believed in a passionate stoicism, wrote long ago that cultures sometimes lose their creative drive and become decadent. So I believe that our society is losing touch with true spiritual and artistic ambition, and is forgetting the old wisdoms. We live in a mechanical, technological and materialistic age, and the tendency is towards a world-view which marginalises poetry and haiku-writing, in terms of education as well as contemporary adult life-styles. Society is rife with crime, corruption, violence, hatred, and ever more mental illness. D H Lawrence warned us early in the last century in his poem ‘Nemesis’:
  ‘If we do not rapidly open all the doors of consciousness and  
   freshen the putrid little space in which we are cribbed the sky-   blue walls of our unventilated heaven will be bright red with 
                                                                                      blood.’
  The various kinds of discourse that are poetry, and in particular the haiku, with its way of life that is accessible to all, can help us to fight against this state of affairs. Despite the words of George Steiner that no book will change the world, and that pure poetry may exist for reasons beyond or outside that aim, I believe that we should still try, that is try to bring a dimension of some spirituality and depth and love and joy to the lives of ordinary people, who are increasingly swamped by consumerism and a banality in which spirituality itself can be seen as just another ‘commodity’. The haiku can be at the heart of this fight to bring real harmony and peace back to the hard wilderness of contemporary living. Even so slight a poetic form as the haiku could paradoxically have real clout - if more and more people were taught to love poetry once again and to value nature, or creation, or the sacred. It is not yet too late, though the way ahead is going to be difficult Rilke hinted at it when he wrote: “What is our task? Our task is to listen to the news that is always arriving out of silence”. The Welsh poet R S Thomas put it in these brilliant lines from Counterpoint (p.50):

But in the silence of the mind            It is a presence then
is when we live best, within              whose margins are our margins
listening distance of the silence          that calls us out over
we call God. This is the deep           own fathoms. What to do
calling to the deep of the psalm-       but draw a little nearer to
writer, the bottomless ocean             such ubiquity by remaining
we launch the armada of                   still?
our thoughts on, never arriving.