To Read Or Not To Read?
 by: Jo Redding

If you stopped to ask someone today to name at least ten British poets/writers from the last hundred years, what percentage would be able to reel them off? Would they be able to tell you the names of the five Romanic poets of the 18th Century? Can you? If asked instead to name famous books or characters, no doubt the response would be easier. The so called “Classics” have continued to outshine anything that has been written in the last eighty years, is it that our ability is less or that we now have too many other distractions and lack the focus to write great works?

Is it a reflection of the changes in education or the fast pace, throw away society that we all inhabit? Writing a letter and reading a book has been largely replaced with abbreviated text messaging, computer gaming, DVD’s and bland television, yet these all lack the comfort and satisfaction we get from curling up with a good book and escaping into an imaginary world.

Although some 60,000 books are published each year in English, it is still the classics that we hold dear with characters like Alice in Wonderland, Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes, Jane Eyre and Romero and Juliet. Their man-made worlds captivate us and they themselves, spring to life from the pages just as their writers intended them to do.

It must also be noted that whilst people know many of the wonderful characters that have been created like Mr Pickwick by Dickens and Mrs Bennett in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” many people are only familiar with them by film rather than book. The film industry is notorious for changing storylines and details so that what is seen on the screen is often far removed from the original script but is that still better than to have no knowledge of the work at all?

When we look at poetry, we see a steady decline in the purchase of books but a huge interest in poetry and poems on line. Look for poems in any search engine and the choice is phenomenal and not just for poems on love but from illness to humour it is all popular. In the month of June alone, over 320,000 people searched for “love Poem”.

It would appear, the romantic interest in particular of this form of literary self-expression, is still in great demand, so perhaps poetry and the need to romanticise, is more of an integral part of our being, than we realise. An inner need for self expression and to capture what is in our hearts is often hard to do, poetry has always been the purest form to fill that void.

What of the writers themselves that have made such an insurmountable impact on the English language? So often tragedies in their lives are mirrored in their writings and often their lives were cruelly snatched away through illness such as that of the brilliant poet Keats, who died of tuberculosis at just twenty-five, having nursed his mother and his brother Tom, with the same disease.

It has often been said that those that have known real suffering display the greatest incite and ability in whatever artistic discipline they choose to express themselves or, is it by way of compensation that they are given this gift? Joseph Conrad (Jozef Korzeniowski) for instance, left his Native Poland to become a merchant seaman. He was shipwrecked and attempted suicide before coming to England. He suffered illness and poverty for most of his life. Does human suffering drive the pen to create monumental Masterpieces? We cannot deny that we no longer in the western world know huge poverty and scientific advancement has ensured that many diseases have been eradicated and even depression, can also now be controlled sufficiently- Perhaps then this is so.

So I conclude that whilst we seek for greater thrills as humans, strive to improve our technology and push the boundaries of decency with Internet porn and a decline of programming on television, we still have an innate need to experience something beautiful, untainted and pure. Poetry and good literature gives us what is so lacking in our modern world, it is a safe haven and speaks to us of innocence, is unadulterated and us such, ensures its’ own survival through greatness and necessity.

About The Author

Written by Jo Redding from www.poems-by-post.com

All rights reserved 2006.