Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times
- May 10
- 2 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
★★★☆☆
Tracy K. Smith served as the twenty-second Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times was originally conceived as an expansion of the lecture she delivered at the close of her first term, in 2018, entitled “Staying Human: Poetry in the Age of Technology.” But technology has accelerated to such an extent since then that she was no longer inclined to research, nor felt particularly qualified to write such a book. Instead, she found her way “into this meditation on poetry as a counterpoint to the larger value system of which technology is but one efficient vehicle.”
Unfortunately, I didn’t find Fear Less to be the meditation on poetry Smith set out to deliver. Perhaps my expectations are to blame, perhaps it’s having read this on the heels of Ada Limón’s Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry, or perhaps it’s the book’s subtitle, which gave the impression that this would take a big-picture, wide-angle view of poetry, an expanded, if you will, version of Against Breaking, which was Limón’s lecture to close out her term as Poet Laureate in 2025. Instead, like Emerson’s “Nature,” about which I wrote, “Finding inspiration in nature in Nature is like someone explaining the beauty of a classic car by providing a list of parts and the instructions for its assembly,” Fear Less tacks a similar approach, attempting to make a grand case for poetry by breaking down the technical elements of the craft and through close readings of poems both contemporary and classic.
In the final chapter, “Be Ye Not Afraid,” Smith argues that we should worry (or think) less about whether a poem is good or bad, better or worse, when the relative success of a poem has more to do with a reader’s capacity for attention and with the degree of associative resourcefulness they bring to the act of reading. That is, “a poem might leave one reader cold not because it has failed in its aims, but because that person is, for the time being, uninterested in the stakes of the poem’s chosen material.” Is Fear Less too academic, too clinical in its dissection of poetry? Or was I, for the time being anyway, uninterested in the stakes of the chosen material? I wanted a sermon, to be taken to the mountaintop, and, to paraphrase Ross Gay, sing and shudder, scream and reach and dance and cry. Instead, I got a lecture. Instead, Smith wrote one book, and I wanted another.
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