A little package came the other day with a book inside: 100 Poems to Lift Your Spirits from Grand Central Publishing, Ed. Leslie Pockell.

The book is divided into four groupings of poems: Nature, Nonsense, Spiritual and The Human Connection. The poems in each group reflect on one of those topics: Keats’ “To Autumn” is in Nature; Kipling’s “The Thousandth Man” gets filed under The Human Connection, etc and so forth: let it be written, so let it be done.

As per the introduction, 100 Poems to Lift Your Spirits seeks to lift spirits, improve your mood and disperse cares. If you’re feeling blue, pick up this book (always close at hand) and find solace in some old words (or some new ones);we all know poets have been through the wringer.

It’s hard, however, to expect words to DO SOMETHING when we want them to. Putting 100 poems together in a book and asking them to lift your spirits whenever you open the cover is contrary to the nature of poetry.

Poetry is a sudden arrival at a truth–not to say that writing a good poem is quick or easy, but the kernel of the idea that makes a poem appears to you in a hocking stutter–before it is a poem and it is gripping–the kernel takes hold of you and tells you to put down a few notes about a tree; you end up writing a poem.
A poem then, is a recognition of a symbol. When we are moved by poetry, we are moved by the poet’s description of a symbol we too have gleamed: poetry is relational. We are moved by words because suddenly we do not feel so cut off from the inner color of humanity.

That said, the emotional experience with poetry–with art–is most effective when it is spontaneous.

Let’s say you’re in college, in a gray lecture hall; you open a textbook in your American Lit survey course, thumb the pages, mostly asleep. Maybe the the last two words of a poem written by a 19th century schoolteacher catch your eye; you read the poem backwards with increasing tingle; you read the poem forwards; you are awake; you flip back to see who is this schoolteacher…you expected nothing, but will leave the room charged with a name, thumping humble lines over in your head; the encounter was chance; the experience will be with you the rest of your life.

You open a book called 100 Poems to Lift Your Spirits and you expect to leave the pages feeling better–the book has promised this. A very lofty claim. If you do not, the book has failed; if you leave feeling worse, the book becomes infamous. Both of these possibilities are doubtful, at the very least you will probably depart in a thoughtful reverie. But the book makes a claim about poetry: all of these poems, written hundreds of years apart in different parts of the world by vastly different human beings, will all do the same thing: lift your spirits.

Perhaps the most concerning aspect therein is the verb “lift.” Do spirits need lifting? Do cares need dispersing? It’s unlikely that many of the authors anthologized here wrote these poems out from the weight of their cares. Disperse cares and you often disperse struggle; thus you disperse growth, change, evolution and finally revelation, the impetus to glee.

100 Poems to Lift Your Spirits, Grand Central Publishing, Ed. Leslie Pockell, 2008, $12.99