When people think about poetry, they think of flowery language, long lamentations of unbegotten love, internal wars of torn personas battling torrents of emotion, beguiling descriptions of Romantic vistas where every blade of grass is painted in vivid detail with a hard-to-grasp frame of meter like iambic pentameter or dactylic tetrameter. People think of sentences a little like this one.
But that isn’t the case. Poetry can be like this. Short. To the point. Possessing harsh brevity. Precision. So, which is better? And what can poetry teach us about modern PR?
Ulysses on the metro
Compare these two excerpts.
First, Ezra Pound’s In a Station of the Metro:
“The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
petals on a wet, black bough.”
And now Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses:
“It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.”
Pound’s Metro is, in fact, the entire poem. Two lines, 14 words, 19 syllables. One singular, startling image. A metro station, ghostlike faces, apparitions of modernity.
Now consider Ulysses. One sentence sprawling across five lines, 50 syllables of unrhymed iambic pentameter, flitting between the gentle interior of the “still hearth” and the violence of the “barren crags”. A mythological king sits, anxious, restless, indifferent to the people around him.
Neither one of these poems is better than the other. Perhaps you have a favourite. Perhaps you like neither. Regardless, the two styles can teach us something about PR and modern communication.
Pounding PR
Pound’s imagist masterpiece is an exercise in precision. Reportedly, the problematic poet cut it down from 30 lines. This ruthless refinement is familiar to anyone who has watched a press release shrink from 900 to 450 words – and improve in the process. In PR, clarity is rarely about adding. It’s about removing.
Yet we aren’t going to suggest Tennyson’s poem is bad, are we? The great orator of The Charge of the Light Brigade rendered fluffy and useless. Of course not. Because it isn’t the poem that decides its own greatness, or even the poet. It’s the relationship between poem and reader. It’s the audience. Ulysses is less like a press release and more like a thought leadership piece. A longer piece weaving together ideas, telling a narrative and painting not a picture but a panorama.
PR, much like poetry, requires an audience to make it effective. Communication requires a relationship. We can say it’s between the poet and the reader, or we can say it is between the PR professional and the audience. It is the same bond that is being built. Communication does not end when the words leave the page. It ends when they are received.
Prufrock in the boardroom
“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;”
– The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot
If Pound teaches precision and Tennyson teaches scale, then our final poet, T.S. Eliot, teaches us something altogether more unsettling. The tyranny of the audience.
In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Eliot gives us a paralysed speaker, a paralysis not of ignorance but of perception. “They will say…” Prufrock repeats, imagining judgment on words that he has yet to even say. He measures his life “with coffee spoons”, rehearsing conversations that never quite happen. He asks the reader 15 questions. The tragedy is not that he has nothing to say (he has 140 lines worth of things to say and six in an Italian epigraph). It is that he can’t bear how it might be received.
The Love Song isn’t really about love. It is about exposure.
This anxiety feels distinctly modern. Today, every statement – corporate or otherwise – is released into a colosseum of commentary. It will be interpreted not just by its intended audience, but by many unintended ones. In this situation, communication can easily become Prufrockian, marked by a second-guessing tone, a sanding down of edges, replacing clarity with caution.
And yet, Eliot’s Love Song cuts both ways. Prufrock’s endless editing doesn’t protect him. It diminished him. His fear of misinterpretation becomes a self-fulfilling silence.
PR operates in the same psychological space. To communicate is to risk. Words shape perception; that is their power, but they cannot control it entirely. The role of the communicator is not to eliminate reaction, but to understand it. To anticipate emotion but not be ruled by it. To speak with intent in a landscape of scrutiny.
Pound distilled and Tennyson inhabited, Eliot exposes the cost of hesitation. In poetry and in PR alike, influence depends not only on craft, but on courage.
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