Poetry’s healthier than I feared.

For my first adult decade I pined to be a poet. In college, I trained to be a musician. I’d abandoned that dream but not the dream of musical words. My mentor was a poet. Shakespeare was a poet. Thoreau was a poet (not that good a poet, but still…). I read poetry greedily – only alone. No one I knew discussed poetry out of the classroom. In the working world, mere mention of poetry made eyeballs roll. Poetry, it seemed, was going the way of lacemaking, antimacassars. This most ancient artistic medium – a victim of the times.

Then came the Internet. As some animals adapt to new conditions – seagulls, say, to Rome, miles from the sea – so may modes of communication. The sociable telephone call, for example, is giving way to less time-specific or obtrusive texting. The mini-series serves psychic appetites once satisfied by the serial novel. The emoji resembles a preliterate gesture.

Poetry is the most intimate literary expression. Books and plays are made to be enjoyed by many. Once upon a time bards and troubadours entertained assemblies, but that was before electricity or literacy. Lyric poetry, an invention of the ancients, was composed for one-on-one consumption. Any private anguish suited poetry but love especially. You do not shout endearments.

Modernity atomized community: we enjoyed less one-on-one time, hurrying hither and yon, scrolling the Web, texting, going places. We also lost the stillness in which a poem must incubate. A poem resembles a seed planted in another’s brain. It takes time and stillness to blossom. Today’s entertainment must shout over the roar (“Turn down that damn TV, Mildred!”).

The Internet enabled long-distance intimacy, a new concept in human relations. Half a world apart you could be affectionately privately together, almost embracing. This possibility made passion more portable. The Internet’s impatient attention span favored brief bursts, “bites,” and got restless with extended discourse (see, emojis). Novels and histories beg for bindings to convey their entirety, but a poem needs a book only as an egg a carton, for transport. Entire as eggs, most poems fit onto a page or two – or a screen.

Miraculously, the Internet enables the formation of specialized communities. Whatever your enthusiasm, there were others out there who shared it, if you could locate them. Wizardly algorithms now sniff them out. Some weeks ago, I published a piece about a mopey and little-remembered poet named Ernest Dowson. I doubted anyone would read it with all that’s amiss in our world. My missive fetched me 136 new subscribers – my record to date. Go figure!

Suddenly, I and all the other lonely poetry-lovers were not alone. We could communicate, commune, birds of a feather flocking together. I might have passed a lifetime before meeting 136 Dowson-lovers face to face – and, gratis the Internet, I’d convened a small convention in a few hours.

In my twenties I forsook poetry, except when the only shoulder I could cry on was my own. Though I couldn’t live without it, poetry’s isolation made me feel more forlorn, estranged, unappreciated, misunderstood, etc. (Self-pity is a poet’s prerequisite!)

Now – whooee! – I revel in a convivial community of sorrowful scribblers, dead and alive. Forbears, technique, reputations become ripe conversational topics. We’ll never be as numerous as worshippers of Taylor Swift or Elon Musk, but we don’t want to be. Exclusivity appeals to poetry-lovers (sniff, sniff). Experts lose their authority as more and more participate in the pastime. The fifty greatest poems in English? – says who! Let me name my own.

Happy days (in these unhappy days).