Eleven summers ago I was sent to a management program at the Wharton School to be prepared for bigger things. Along with lectures on finance and entrepreneurship and the like, the program included a delightfully out-of-place session with AI Filreis, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, on poetry.

    For three hours he talked us through “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. ” The experience—especially when contrasted with the horrible prose of our other assigned reading—sent me fleeing to the campus bookstore,  where I resumed a long-interrupted romance with meter and rhyme (朝）.

    Professor Filreis says that he is “a little shocked” at how intensely his Wharton students respond to this unexpected deviation from the businesslike, not just as a relief but as a kind of stimulus. Many write afterward asking him to recommend books of poetry. Especially now.

    “The grim economy seems to make the participants keener than ever to think ‘out of the box’ in the way poetry encourages, ” he told me.

    Which brings me to Congress, an institution stuck deeper inside the box than just about any other these days. You have probably heard that up on Capitol Hill (美国国会山）, they’re very big on prayer breakfasts,  where members gather over scrambled eggs and ask God for wisdom. You can judge from the agonizing debt spectacle we’ve watched this summer how well that’s working. Well, maybe it’s time to add some poetry readings to the agenda. 

    I’m not suggesting that poetry will guide our legislators to wisdom any more than prayer has. Just that it might make them a little more human. Poetry is no substitute for courage or competence, but properly applied, it is a challenge to self-certainty, which we currently have in excess. Poetry serves as a spur to creative thinking, a reproach to dogma and habit, a remedy to the current fashion for pledge signing. 

    The poet Shelley, in defense of poetry nearly two centuries ago, wrote, “A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.” Shelley concludes that essay by calling poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” because they bring imagination to the realm of “reasoners and mechanists. ”

The relevance of poetry was declared more concisely in five lines from the love poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” by William Carlos Williams:

It is difficult

to git the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of whit is found there.