Why Men Need Poetry

Time to get in touch with our feelings, bro

Last week I was driving home listening to The Holy Post Podcast, and they were talking about how in America right now many people’s religious impulses are being channeled into politics. The ever wise Kaitlyn Scheiss then made this observation that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about:

“A lot of times when I see people who are getting, not just caught up in politics, but starting to believe some really hateful scary extremist stuff, I often think, you are looking for an outlet to scream at someone, and you have lost the communal ritual of, we actually have a practice of crying out to God, we have not only more modern texts that help us do that, but the Psalms, that are often uncomfortably violent and aggressive and ask God to do things that, many of us would read them and think ‘I hope God doesn’t do that because that doesn’t sound like something God should do.’ But we have forms for doing this. Matthew Kaemingk, who’s a theologian, has written about this when it comes to kind of extreme ethno-nationalist stuff online, that some of it starts to sound like laments that don’t have a place to go, they don’t have a form to take on, they don’t have a community to help regulate them, so they get awful. And part of what I hear in a lot of this is, humans, whether we acknowledge it or not, need language to help us describe [these things].…I think a lot of people are hearing, the world’s just getting better and better, the world is just better today than it was a year ago, and so they don’t know how to express what they perceive to be really awful, really personally harmful, really scary or uncertain things, they don’t have language to describe that, and then when they go online they feel like the options are either join this really hateful white supremacist kind of group, or join the crowd of people who says no we are just getting constantly better, and things are bright and sunny, and so then they go down a really dark path.” The Holy Post, ep. 612

There’s a lot of insightful stuff that could be unpacked here, but the thought that came to my mind as I was listening was “Oh yeah, this is why men need poetry”.

There’s been a lot of cultural conversation in recent years over the crisis of masculinity. As Sean Illing writes for Vox, “Whether you look at education or the labor market or addiction rates or suicide attempts, it’s not a pretty picture for men — especially working-class men.” Many men seem to be in search of identity, purpose, and meaning in a society that has become more broadly inclusive and has become critical of “traditional” masculinity, going so far as to identify certain traditional masculine traits as “toxic”.

This crisis has also been showing up in politics, as Kaitlyn Scheiss observed, because when you look at the rise of alt-right and ethno-nationalist extremism in America, it’s primarily driven by and attracting men. While much ink has been spilled delving into all the cultural and sociological and psychological factors driving this attraction to extremism, Scheiss points out one factor in the mix, which is that men have often been left without the language and ability to articulate their emotions and feelings, and the result is that this often manifests as anger and rage¹

While it seems true that, whether by biology or cultural shaping or both, a majority of men tend to lean in a stoic direction, it also appears to me that in the past men have had poetry at their disposal for helping them process their emotions.

Ty Karnitz writes,

Poetry has been written and read by men for generations, reaching back thousands of years to the ancient Greeks, Sumerians, and even to the ancient oral traditions. Poetry used to be read and recited around a fireplace or in a cafe as a form of entertainment. And Theodore Roosevelt, an epitome of manliness, loved poetry, and as president gave government jobs to poets on the condition they do nothing but write new poems.

In the past, poetry was part of a gentleman’s formal education. Today, we’re taught poetry in school, but because it’s forced on us we reject it. We claim poetry is not for us men because poetry is emotional, and as men, we’re told from a very young age that emotions are not for us. Because of this, poetry can be difficult to approach for the modern man….poetry has lost its place in the world and because of that, we’ve forgotten about it. But maybe the gentlemen of the past knew something we don’t. Maybe they read poetry…because it did something for them, because poetry isn’t only about flowers and rainbows. Poetry is about war, friendship, nature, spirituality, and everything a boy needs to know about being a well-rounded man.

The problem, as Karnitz points out, is that most modern men have been culturalized to perceive poetry as “feminine”. Drs. Rich Furman and LeConte Dill confirm this in their article “Poetry therapy, men, and masculinities”:

Scholars have noted that men and boys may often be resistant to poetry due to their own conceptions of masculinities. [Joann] Gardner (1993), in discussing her work with runaway youth noted that: A number of the boys resisted the idea of poetry altogether, finding it too threatening for their masculinity or protected themselves from exposure by refusing to cooperate (p. 218). Poetry is often viewed as a feminine art form. Indeed, this compounds the tendency that art in general may be viewed as anti-masculine by traditional, working class men.

There is a challenge here, for sure, in that many men will be resistant to the idea of poetry, or opening up to express more complex, softer feelings. But it seems to me that the benefits to society of healthier men are well worth the challenges.

I can say for myself, as someone who has never comfortably fit the traditional masculine stereotype and yet identifies as a man, that both reading and writing poetry have done so much to help me become a well rounded, more emotionally healthy person. Reading poetry has given me language over and over again for feelings I didn’t even realize I had, or felt but couldn’t articulate. And writing poetry has helped me do the hard work of excavating my own complex emotions that I could not otherwise express or articulate.

We are, all of us humans, linguistic creatures, but for some reason or another modern men have often been trained, by themselves and others, to cut themselves off from a whole swath of language that can help us articulate ourselves, and it’s contributing to the masculine havoc we see all around us.

It’s time get back in touch with our feelings and read and write some poetry again, bros.

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1. Let me be absolutely clear here that I am no way saying that the racism, sexism, misogyny, and homophobia that often manifests in alt-right circles emerges just because “men can’t express their feelings”. I am not letting men off the hook for bad behavior. There’s a hot mess of factors happening here, of which extreme stoicism is just one.