In the face of modernity, the written word retains its timless quality

The beauty of the written word is going to save us all in the end. Why is it that poetry existed so long ago, when the development of man was so young? We have always been drawn to the aesthetic description of life, of symbol and metaphor, both to appreciate it as the product of imagination and as a test of our intellectual potential. And yet, if you ask a thousand people today, perhaps one will tell you that he or she is a poet; perhaps a dozen will be able to name a favorite verse or two, and perhaps a few more will admit to even having read some before.

Where has our reverence for poetry gone? Is it truly just the intellectuals of the modern day that can appreciate it? Are we so preoccupied with wealth, money, fame, productivity, practicality, the next paycheck, our favorite television shows, and all the other attention-killing distractions of the age that we no longer care for words? Perhaps the media of today have surpassed the written word; after all, a picture more accurately describes reality than words can, and a video portrays motion and expression infinitely more realistically than any picture or photograph.

But that is not the triumph of the written word; portraying the real is no longer, and has not been for a hundred years, the objective of poetry or fiction. Words strike us more deeply than any picture can; the meaning of a word is not bound by vision alone, and as we digest the words on a page, every one of us recreates it with our own memories and perceptions—words are not finite things, they are recreated every time they are read.

How else can the great pieces of literature remain so, read across history without regard to the measure of time? Like music, words and poetry are inhaled and processed through the whole of us, touching every fiber, and then recollected somewhere to form meaning that differs from one person to another.

The essential human part of us is the part words speak to, and in the end, the cultivation of what makes us human—emotion, interpretation, love of beauty—is what will remain the finest endeavor. Every one of us has an inventor of words staring him or herself in the mirror; it takes only a pen and a little boldness to see that writer and creator live.

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