'Hope Is the Mother of the Stupid'

There’s a lot of talk going around that literature, poetry in particular, is a source of hope in a hope-deficient age. The website of the Poetry Foundation has a page called “Poems of Hope and Resilience,” which carries the slogan “The words of others can help to lift us up.” It may be significant that only four of the fifty-three poets cited on the page are writers of any worth or interest.

You hear the rah-rah talk most often from writers, not readers. Their argument is rooted in the suspicion that what they do is usually pretty irrelevant and doesn’t mean much to anybody else. Trying to rebrand poetry as inspirational or therapeutic, anything other than poetic, suggests desperation. Zbigniew Herbert knew something about poetry and hope. In 1984 he told an interviewer with The Manhattan Review:

“Writing—and in this I disagree with everybody—must teach men soberness: to be awake. [Spoken in English.] To make people sober. It does not mean, not to try. But with a small internal correction. I reject optimism despite all the theologians. Despair is a fruitful feeling. It is a cleanser, from desire, from hope. `Hope is the mother of the stupid.’ [This is a Polish proverb.] I don’t like hope.”