The deaths of Derek Walcott and Chuck Berry prompt the question: what’s going to happen to poetry? At least since the invention of printing, poetry has been written to be read in silence and perhaps in solitude. Poetry, music and religion must all once have been indistinguishable, but they separated millennia ago in the west. It is almost a definition of great poetry that it creates the silence around itself that it needs to be heard in, just as great music can. A hundred years from now, there will still be children who pick up Walcott and hear his voice speaking clearly to their hearts.

Source: The Guardian March 19, 2017 19:41 UTC