'Anecdotal Evidence About the Human Heart'

Wendy Cope’s most recent poetry collection is fetchingly titled Anecdotal Evidence (Faber & Faber, 2018). The phrase refers to uncorroborated claims rooted in personal observation. A lawyer may object and the judge sustain but you and I rely on anecdotal evidence every day. Few of us are chemists or mathematicians, and even they aren’t scientifically rigorous at the bowling alley. Our beliefs and values, what we think, what we know, and what we think we know are cobbled together from direct observation, prejudice and sheer fantasy. Among sophisticates, “data” has replaced knowledge, and there’s still something around called social “science.” Meanwhile, what is most human about us cannot be quantified. 

Cope takes her title from the first poem in her book, “Evidence,” which begins with a quote attributed to a “scientific researcher”: “A great deal of anecdotal evidence suggests that we respond positively to birdsong.” Careers have been built on saying such fatuous things. Keats knew better. Here is Cope’s poem:

 

“Centuries of English verse

Suggest the selfsame thing:

A negative response is rare

When birds are heard to sing.

 

“What’s the use of poetry?

You ask. Well, here’s a start:

It’s anecdotal evidence

About the human heart.”

 

Whether we’re reading Dante, Yeats or Wendy Cope, poetry amounts to a report on who we are and why we do what we do. In his foreword to In Defense of Reason (1947), Yvor Winters defines a poem as “a statement in words about a human experience” --  in other words, anecdotal evidence. When we’re gone, what remains of us? Anecdotal evidence.