Historically, poets have had less to say about pandemics than you might imagine. Hardly any English-language poetry written during successive waves of bubonic plague focused directly on the effects of the disease, for instance, and exceptions often had a purpose external to any we’d normally now ascribe to poetry.
The 14th century monk and poet John Lydgate’s Doctrine for Pestilence (c.1415) is a wonderful example. It was intended to be used for “governance” for treatment. “Fro[m] frutes hold thyn abstinence,” he advises, but eat chickens and drink good wine. I doubt this helped.
For most poets, pandemics could provide a context for poems, but rarely became a focus. A tome of significant poems about pandemics would only be achievable with considerable barrel-scraping – perhaps excluding poetry about AIDS, which of course devastated some communities significantly more than others.
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A striking example of a pandemic leaving little poetic legacy is the Spanish flu (1918-20). It infected about a third of people worldwide and killed at least 50,000,000. That’s considerably more than the first world war, which immediately preceded it and which has perhaps left a bigger literary legacy than any other secular event.
The American scholar of 20th-century literature and culture Elizabeth Outka has argued that works such as The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats (1919) and The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (1922) can be read through the lens of that pandemic. But strikingly few poems make it a focal point, or even mention it.
Poetry and covid survey
COVID was different in many crucial ways. It was (or is) a pandemic of the internet age, in which similarities and differences in our experiences were laid bare in real time, globally.
In 2020 and 2021, I co-led the UKRI-funded project Poets Respond to COVID-19. We published an international anthology of collaboratively written poems, and ran a website, attracting about 10,000 visitors a month between July 2020 and June 2021.
On this site, we published hundreds of poems, submitted by people all over the world who were often living very different lives from one another – overworked nurses, suddenly laid-off workers, grieving daughters and lonely widows among them.
What shone through most frequently, however, was the desire so many people evidently had, almost whatever their circumstances, to show how they might make the best of their circumstances. They often did this by focusing on what made them grateful, say, or by celebrating the sudden preciousness of previously mundane interactions.
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In early 2021, as the pandemic continued to push most people out of and back into lockdown, we ran a survey adapted from the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale, targeted at understanding the value of poetry and the website to mental wellbeing.
It was completed by 373 people. Over 80% said the website helped them feel inspired and actively express themselves. Over 65% said it helped them feel better able to process their feelings about the pandemic.
Moreover, 51% indicated that reading or writing poetry had helped them deal with loneliness or isolation. For 50%, it had helped with anxiety and depression. In written responses, many respondents focused specifically on writing poetry, and the following is not unrepresentative: “Poetry has been a lifeline throughout the pandemic, both reading and writing it (sometimes a strong rope and other times a thin string)”.
The website principally served willing (and sometimes talented) amateurs. But many professional poets have also written “lockdown poems”, and several have published sequences, or whole collections, about COVID. Examples include the title sequence in The Missing Months by Lachlan Mackinnon (2022) and the entirety of Jacqueline Saphra’s One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets (2021).
Among the 30,000
Considering the past lack of pandemic poetry, this phenomenon is surprising. Though never before has a pandemic directly affected so many who were removed from one another and, in most cases, simultaneously pulled together, face to face – largely through catch-ups on Zoom, which most of us had never heard of until 2020, and daily socially distanced neighbourhood trots.
Many poets, Saphra and Mackinnon among them, were frequently drawn to this tension in their poems of the time, and poets are almost always drawn to tensions. “Alas there is no plan,” wrote Saphra:
no bread, compassion’s nearly out of stock,
but we can walk together in the park
keeping our distance.
Mackinnon’s pithier poems also keep coming back to erstwhile commonplace scenes rendered uncanny, as in Lockdown: Our Bench Again, in which a couple takes refuge in a familiar place as “death floats about us”. In Lockdown: Tim Pride, 1965-2020, the special grief of “attending” a funeral online provides, as cold comfort, the opportunity for elegy:
Among the thirty thousand so far dead
The numbers who can never all be counted
This kind man
Alone at home
Spare funeral on line
These are the non-sequiturs of febrile, grieving thought – of a poet trying to come to terms with what is happening (and what might at any moment also happen to him) as he watches what he would normally join.
Writing these poems may not have assuaged his anxiety, and is unlikely to do much for ours, either. However, as the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson put it in a review in 1757: “The only end of writing is to enable the reader” – or, perhaps, the author – “better to enjoy life, or better to endure it”. Endurance is its own assuagement of anxiety.
But we all had to do that, more or less; and now, essentially, it feels as though most of us would rather try to forget the whole affair. The “COVID poem” is already a thing of the past, with occasional after-tremors. I suspect its remembered legacy is likely to be relatively small – until any possible next time, at least.
