Opinion In the age of algorithms, we need to pause for poetry

Poetry stands against this flattening. It resists the reduction of life into data. Poetry restores mystery to meaning, silence to speech, and interpretation to experience. It teaches us that words are not tools but tremors. That a pause can be as eloquent as a phrase. That language, when stripped of ambiguity, loses its soul.

T S Eliot once wrote, “For I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” In that single image lies the quiet horror of quantification. A life reduced to teaspoons, predictable portions of habit and convenience. A century later, Eliot’s line reads like prophecy. Every step, calorie, and heartbeat is measured. The poet’s lament has become the user’s dashboard. The question is no longer poetic. It is practical. Are we living, or are we being measured?

Poetry refuses such measurement. It is gloriously inefficient. It demands attention without reward, immersion without outcome. It slows us down in a culture that worships acceleration. It reminds us that not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that moves us can be monetised.

Mary Oliver offered another kind of reminder when she asked, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” That line is not a prompt for productivity. It is an invitation to presence. It stands against a world that rewards predictability and punishes pause. It asks us to reclaim the private interior, the part of ourselves that cannot be optimised, summarised, or shared. In a society obsessed with efficiency, wonder itself becomes an act of rebellion.

Modern life has reduced meaning to management. We manage our time, our emotions, even our identities. We brand our individuality, filter our realities, and trade authenticity for visibility. In this marketplace of signs, poetry becomes a subversive form of reading. It insists that signs still have shadows, that symbols cannot be owned by corporations, that a word can still astonish.

Neuroscience tells us that poetry lights up the brain’s reward and empathy circuits. Sociology tells us something deeper. Poetry keeps the social fabric from fraying. It rebuilds the shared imagination. It helps us feel without having to perform feeling. It reminds us that empathy is not a metric and that presence has no algorithm.

And yet, the age of automation wants to mimic even the sacred. Machines now generate verse, craft rhyme, simulate sentiment. But what they lack is intent. The trembling human awareness that gives meaning to words. Algorithms can reproduce rhythm, but not remorse. They can mimic longing, but not feel it. They can record a heartbeat, but never break one.

Poetry endures because it refuses perfection. It carries within it the human crack, the breath that falters, the moment that slips between sense and sound. In its imperfections, it mirrors us. Roland Barthes once said that reading is an act of resurrection. Poetry resurrects the reader from the deadness of routine. It teaches us to see again, not just to look. To interpret again, not merely to process. To feel without converting that feeling into content. The poet, in that sense, is not a romantic figure lost in abstraction. She is a semiotic insurgent, decoding a world desperate to appear simple.

Imagine a culture where people read not for information but for transformation. Where the pause between two lines matters more than the scroll between two screens. Where the mind learns again to live with uncertainty, to embrace contradiction, to savour metaphor. Such a culture would be harder to manipulate, because it would know how to read between lines. And every empire, corporate or political, fears a citizen who can interpret.

Poetry is, finally, a way of seeing. It reminds us that the visible world is not the real one. That every skyline is not just architecture but aspiration, inequality and dream. That the body is not just biology but biography. That even a wound can have meaning if we dare to name it. Poetry re-enchants the world in a time that has mistaken information for understanding.

So let us return to verse. Let Eliot’s spoons remind us of what we refuse to become. Let Oliver’s question echo inside us like conscience. Let us choose metaphor over metric, meaning over measurement, mystery over management. Because poetry is not escape. It is return. Return to self, to silence, to everything that cannot be quantified.

And when the networks track every heartbeat and the algorithms predict every move, remember this. They can measure your time, but they cannot live your moments. That, in the end, is what makes us free.

The writer is an advisory professional