There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think

“There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.” Thus declared John Ashbery, the elusive master of modern verse, whose words cut through expectation with wit and paradox. He warns us against reducing poetry to a tool of moral instruction or social uplift, as though its role were merely to rescue the fallen or clothe the poor. Poetry, in his vision, is not charity—it is art. It exists not to comfort or fix us, but to awaken, to perplex, to dazzle, to reflect the bewildering fullness of existence.

The meaning of this saying lies in the distinction between art and utility. The Salvation Army feeds the hungry, shelters the homeless, clothes the cold. These are noble works of service. But poetry does not work in this same way. It does not hand out solutions like bread. Instead, it plunges us into mystery. It may disquiet rather than soothe, unsettle rather than repair. To expect poetry to “improve your life” is to misunderstand its purpose. Its task is not salvation, but revelation—to make us see more, feel more, imagine more, even when that vision troubles us.

The origin of Ashbery’s view comes from his place within the modernist and postmodernist traditions. Poets like Eliot, Stevens, and Ashbery himself sought to free poetry from the narrow expectation of moral edification. In the Victorian age, many believed verse must refine character and improve society. Ashbery reacted against this, insisting that poetry’s value lay in its freedom—its capacity to explore without serving as a sermon. His own work, often abstract and elusive, demanded that readers experience language itself, rather than extract tidy lessons.

Consider the story of Walt Whitman, who wrote not to preach salvation but to embrace contradiction and expansion. His Leaves of Grass scandalized some, for it did not offer moral improvement in the traditional sense; it celebrated the body, the self, the cosmos in their vastness. Yet Whitman’s verse endures, not because it “saved” people like an institution of charity, but because it revealed the majesty and chaos of being alive. Whitman, like Ashbery, reminds us that poetry’s greatness lies in revelation, not rescue.

The lesson here is humility: we must approach poetry not as supplicants seeking easy cures, but as explorers willing to confront what we do not understand. When we demand that poetry fix our lives, we shrink it into utility. When we allow it to bewilder us, to speak in ways we cannot fully grasp, we honor its true power. Poetry does not save us—it transforms us, not by offering food for the body, but by opening the windows of the mind.

Practically, this means reading poems with openness rather than expectation. Do not ask, “How will this improve me?” Ask instead, “What does this reveal? What does this awaken in me?” Allow yourself to sit with ambiguity, to feel unease, to delight in beauty that has no purpose but itself. Write your own verses without forcing them to teach or correct; let them simply exist as expressions of what is, not as manuals for what ought to be.

Thus the teaching endures: poetry is not the Salvation Army. It does not hand out blankets for the soul or soup for the mind. Its gift is stranger and more enduring—it awakens us to mystery, it complicates our understanding, it unsettles the neat order of things. John Ashbery reminds us that poetry is not about moral improvement, but about vision. Let us then honor poetry for what it is: a fire that does not feed us, yet illumines the darkness, showing us the vast and bewildering beauty of existence.