Should poems be beautiful?

There’s a bracing honesty in ugly, imperfect, ambiguous art—especially in poetry—that resonates far beyond the superficial gloss of mere prettiness. I have always prized form, elegance, the ordered clash of opposites, whose union might birth something genuinely sublime. Yet what truly stirs me is not the slavish adherence to “ideological” technique, but mastery wielded in the service of authentic expression. Beauty, in all its slippery subjectivity, teeters on the edge of banality when reduced to checklist or catechism. To insist a poem must meet an arbitrary standard of “beauty” is to hobble the artist, stifling the unpredictable vigor that is the very marrow of creation. Such demands are as senseless as telling Turner to paint with rainbows only, or Cezanne to abandon his oblique apples for the crisp chrome of official taste.

The finest poems do not merely conform to prescribed structures; their power erupts from a willingness to break, to disrupt, to surprise—much like the sudden dissonances in Beethoven, or the odd angles in Braque. What matters is not the aesthetic program selected, but the result achieved: a work that stops the reader in their tracks, compels reflection, transforms ordinary language into something unforgettable. It’s the difference between the competent and the extraordinary, between the craftsperson and the visionary. William James and fellow pragmatists generally agreed that the validity of an idea was in how well it worked in the material world, the daily problems humans create for themselves are stumble upon as natural occurence. This seems a maxim truer now than ever, in the age of relentless, empty beauty.

“Interesting” may seem a pallid descriptor, but I choose it deliberately: it encompasses more than the dull tyranny of “beauty,” which so often shackles discussion to surface effects. The artist’s true ambition is not to prettify experience, but to render its chaos and contradiction, to force us into uncomfortable recognitions. The very best poems, for me, are those which illuminate the precise contours of thought, the fissures of personality, the discordant situations that resist easy harmony. To discuss how a poet transmits the inexpressible—through shifts of tone, surprising imagery, or an abrupt stanza break—is infinitely more rewarding than to drone on about “beautiful” lines assembled for their own sake.

Let’s be clear: “beauty,” more often than not, has become a conservative and repressive concept, little more than a velvet glove used to muffle the unruly, the critical. Herbert Marcuse—writing in the shadow of late capitalism’s malaise—declared “beauty” bankrupt, its meaning hollowed out by commercialism and convention. In The Aesthetic Dimension, Marcuse saw the joy of art as its greatest gift, but insisted that society owes the artist freedom, not the imposition of taste. On this, I am with him. Let the artist be true to their talent and let that truth speak, however jagged, however discordant—because the function of art is not to soothe, but to awaken. Those who live lives of routine, not contemplation, depend on artists to sense and articulate what most would never dare to recognize in themselves.

This, then, is Marcuse’s point, and one I take to heart: artists—whether poets, novelists, painters or architects—are the antennae of civilization. Their heightened sensibilities serve not the bland affirmation of received wisdom, but the revelation of nuance, intrigue, and often unsettling truths. Culture would be richer if we abandoned the dull interrogation—“Is it beautiful?”—and instead asked “What does it show?” Artists are not decorators of life’s cliches; they are challengers, questioners, provocateurs. The real discussion is about whether the work pushes us beyond the numbness of dead aesthetics, into the dialectic of contradiction and revelation. The artist must challenge, and the audience must respond—not with rote praise, but with honest argument, for only there does true art live.