Fear Less: Poetry In Perilous Times
Terry K. Smith
Penguin/Random House
Publishing date: Nov. 18, 2025
Oh, how quickly the love of poetry is snuffed out! Last night—with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith’s lovely new volume of essays Fear Less: Poetry In Perilous Times on my mind—I spoke with a friend who also loves poetry about this phenomenon. Small children embrace poetry. They love Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein. The bestselling children’s book Llama Llama Red Pyjama is one long poem. And yet, by middle school the love of poetry gets extinguished. Poetry is taught in schools with a relentless insistence that every poem is just a puzzle that conceals a concrete and static meaning. Smith convincingly argues the opposite: Poetry is a tool through which writer and reader can contend with ambiguity. Early on, Smith writes, “I wish I could say to everyone who lives in the fear of poetry: You don't always have to understand it. You can let it nudge you, let it cause something to start.”
Take, for example, Emily Dickinson’s excellent poem “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun.” The poem makes perfect emotional sense. It immediately strikes the reader’s heart. But venture into the world of analysis and you’ll find a tangled web of oversimplifications.
Is the poem about being God’s servant or inner strength or pent-up rage? Smith would argue that it’s about all of this and more, in the sense that a poem is a dialogue between speaker and poet. Wherever that dialogue wanders is relevant. “When a poem draws observation of the external world into direct dialogue with its speakers' internal delight or unrest,” writes Smith, “it is inviting us to exercise skills critical to the integration of such things as mind and body, the rational and feeling selves, and the individual ego's accountability to other. This is why I am always perplexed by the indefatigable question, Does poetry matter? Why not ask, Does memory matter? Does resilience matter? Do anxiety, hope, courage, wisdom and emotional stamina matter?”
Smith’s book is perfect for the poetry-curious. In our time of hypernormalization, poetry’s power to help us work through the vexing and perplexing makes it more critical, not less. Smith excels at explaining topics like ghazals and iambic pentameter simply and without a whiff of condescension.
That’s not to say the avid poetry reader can skip this book. Smith provides fascinating insights into her process, including how she developed "Declaration", an excellent erasure poem of the Declaration of Independence. (And I, as a rule, roll my eyes at erasure poems. So you know I mean it when I say this one is amazing.)
As the book’s subtitle (Poetry In Perilous Times) indicates, Smith presents poetry as a liberatory force that produces empathy. This thread is the book’s least successful element. Poetry often does promote understanding, but it can also reinforce stereotypes and destructive ideologies. The repressive Victorian ideal of woman as “the angel in the house” was sparked by Coventry Patmore's poem of the same name. Lauded volumes of poetry were written by members of The Hitler Youth, painting the dictator as the country's savior. Smith acknowledges this to a point with her analysis of Frank Bidart's “Curse,” which was written in the Islamophobic aftermath of 9/11. “Rereading ‘Curse’ more than twenty years after its initial publication,” she writes, “I’m discomfited to recognize the degree to which the poem’s rhetorical strategies fall in step with the most disheartening norms of political discourse to have emerged in recent years.” However, she stops short of acknowledging poetry’s ability to amplify harm. Instead, she concludes “Curse” is merely an unsuccessful poem.
But this is a quibble. Taken as a whole, Smith's book makes a convincing argument that poetry can help us contend with the tangled moment of polycrisis we find ourselves in. I'd recommend Fear Less: Poetry In Perilous Times to anyone with a curiosity about poetry as an artform. It’s also the perfect text to convert your poetry-averse loved ones to the Church of The Holy Stanza.
