That was published in 1711, so clearly not much had changed in the previous two millennia. But turn to Percy Shelley’s essay “A Defense of Poetry,” written in 1821, and you will discover that the meaning of the word poetry had undergone a fantastic transformation. Poetry, Shelley says, is “connate with the origin of man,” and “a poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one.” Poetry comprises every creative activity of human nature, including the arts, politics, and science: “The institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life” are all in some sense poets, since they shape reality in the light of their vision. Shelley even speaks of “the poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ,” as if Christianity itself were just one enormous poem.

The Romantics, faced with a disenchanted universe, attempted to discover a new source of enchantment in the human imagination, and poetry became a metaphor for that creative, life-enhancing power. Poetry used to mean poems. Now poems began to seem like just one habitation, and far from the grandest, of the force that is poetry. Naturally, this fateful division between poetry and poems had enormous consequences for the way poems were written. After all, if poetry is ineffable and infinite, there is no reason it should be bound by the mechanical laws of meter and rhyme. In the modern age, poetry became antinomian.

Thus we find Emerson arguing, in his essay “The Poet,” that “it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.” The metaphor of growth cancels out the old metaphor of craft. For Horace, a poem was something you had to learn how to make, at the expense of great effort. For Keats, “if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.”

It is this disjunction between poetry and poems that Ben Lerner explores in The Hatred of Poetry. As a poet—he has written three books of poems, as well as two novels—Lerner is sensitive to the odd psychological transactions that tend to take place between poets and non-poets. The latter often regard the former with a blend of contempt and envy. The contempt is easy enough to understand—poetry is unprestigious, unremunerative, a form of play rather than grown-up work. But it is the envy that Lerner focuses on, the way people who don’t write poetry nevertheless feel the urge to stake a claim to it.

“If you are an adult foolish enough to tell another adult that you are (still!) a poet,” he writes, “they will often describe for you their falling away from poetry: I wrote it in high school; I dabbled in college. Almost never do they write it now.” For Lerner, this is more than mere politeness, an attempt to find some common ground with the poet. Rather, it is an unconscious tribute to the sway that the idea of poetry continues to exert over our collective imagination. “Most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility,” he asserts. Thus, “if I have no interest in poetry or if I feel repelled by actual poems, either I am failing the social or the social is failing me.” Poetry is a gauge of our mutual connection. If we can’t speak the language of poetry, it is a sign that human communication has been blocked in a fundamental way. This feeling of failure is what explains why people tend to hate poetry, rather than simply being indifferent to it. Poetry is the site and source of disappointed hope.