poetry

I'm reading my way through E.M. Forster's A Passage to India (and need to speed up my reading since my third renewal is almost up, which means I'll have to give the book back to the library soon). For those who've not read it, the novel is set in India during the time of British rule and chronicles the relationships between various Indian and British characters.

I was recently struck by the following passage:
"[Aziz] held up his hand, palm outward, his eyes began to glow, his heart to fill with tenderness. Issuing still farther from his quilt, he recited a poem by Ghalib. It had no connection with anything that had gone before, but it came from his heart and spoke to theirs...The squalid bedroom grew quiet; the silly intrigues, the gossip, the shallow discontent were stilled, while words accepted as immortal filled the indifferent air...Of the company, only Hamidullah had any comprehension of poetry. The minds of the others were inferior and rough. Yet they listened with pleasure, because literature had not been divorced from their civilization."

I happened to mention this passage this morning during the wide-ranging discussion of a faith & arts book group I'm part of. We've been reading Lewis Hyde's The Gift and somehow this morning we came to discuss the way the easy access of entertainment has affected people's patience with and access to real art. I confessed that I sometimes wish I could gather friends at my house on a Friday night to read poetry aloud together, because poetry should be communal and audible, but the few times I've sacrificed my coolness ;-) enough to suggest such a thing, there have been no serious takers. :-) Which made me think of this passage. I don't know whether this respect for poetry was ever really true in India or whether it is now, but whether in India or elsewhere there must be places where I might not have such a hard time convincing people to partake of a poetry night. Perhaps I'll get to find those places one day.