What Good Is Poetry? Robert Burns’s Immortal ‘A Red, Red Rose’

What Good Is Poetry? Robert Burns’s Immortal ‘A Red, Red Rose’
The red rose has inspired many songs, poems, and confessions of love, including Robert Burns' song "A Red, Red Rose." Graeme Dawes
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So long as there are lovers in the world, there will be poetry. In fact, it might be argued that if lovers do not produce poetry, they are not really in love. And it is absolutely the case that poetry rejoices even in the earnest, ham-fisted poems written by smitten folks who are not gifted poets. One need not be Bill Shakespeare to write a sonnet of true love and true importance or a “woeful ballad to his mistress’s eyebrow.”

As G.K. Chesterton, a fine poet himself, wrote in his famous vein of anything worth doing is worth doing badly, “It is too often forgotten that just as a bad man is nevertheless a man, so a bad poet is nevertheless a poet.” There is nothing wrong with poetry that is born of love alone, for there is profound reason why the word “amateur” is rooted in the Latin word for love.

Sean Fitzpatrick
Sean Fitzpatrick
Author
Sean Fitzpatrick serves on the faculty of Gregory the Great Academy, a boarding school in Elmhurst, Pa., where he teaches humanities. His writings on education, literature, and culture have appeared in a number of journals, including Crisis Magazine, Catholic Exchange, and the Imaginative Conservative.
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