Effective poems can be – and have been – written on
practically any topic imaginable, and so in the strict sense there are
no topics that are automatically unsuitable for poetic treatment. Some
effective poems have even been written on nonsense. Lewis Carroll’s “Jaberowcky” comes
to mind, which begins as follows:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did
gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the
mome raths outgrabe.
Yet it
seems possible to argue that the poems most likely to live and endure from one
generation to the next are poems dealing with such “archetypal” themes as birth, love,
family, sickness, joy, fear, happiness, nature, and death (to mention just a few).
These are the kinds of experiences and emotions that people have encountered from time
immemorial. They are experiences and emotions that are practically inevitable by the
very nature of life and by the very nature of human beings. They are likely always to
seem relevant and interesting and meaningful to humans as long as humans
exist.
A famous (or infamous) poem by the American poet
Aram Saroyan reads as
follows:
lighght
That’s
it: “lighght.” This poem won a $500 prize from the National Endowment for the
Humanities back in the day (1965) when $500 was actually a decent amount of money. The
award caused considerable controversy at the time, and it is hard to imagine that 500
years from now people will be reading this poem except as a strange curiosity. The
poetry of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Pertrarch, Shakespeare, and many other “canonical”
poets, however, is likely to endure, partly because that poetry engages with archetypal
human issues and – even more important – is actually skillfully written. (Lots of bad
poems have been written on love, death, etc.)
So, although
it is old-fashioned to say so, the poetry that is most likely to continue living is the
poetry that concerns the common, core issues of human life.
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