Time & Perspective Quote by John Barton

Poetry doesn’t start as decoration in Barton’s framing; it starts as technology. By tracing it back to “spells and chants,” he positions the poem not as a polished artifact for quiet appreciation, but as a tool designed to do something to the world: heal, curse, bless, bind a community, steady a grieving mind. The phrasing “used to effect change” is deliberately blunt and almost clinical, as if the oldest poems were closer to medicine or law than to literature.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to how modern culture often domesticate poetry into a school subject or a prestige hobby. Barton is reminding readers that verse was born with stakes. Rhythm and repetition weren’t aesthetic flourishes; they were delivery systems for belief. A chant is memorable because it has to be. A spell is structured because it must be repeatable. In that lineage, craft becomes a form of leverage: sound patterns that lodge in the body, syntax that can be recited under pressure, images that can rewire attention.

Context matters here: Barton writes as a contemporary poet aware of poetry’s shrinking public footprint and its recurring claims of “relevance.” Instead of pleading for poetry’s importance, he returns to origins where importance was assumed because language functioned as action. The intent is less nostalgia than provocation: if poems once changed weather in the imagination, what can they change now - policy, empathy, memory, the private weather of a life? The line asks poets to stop apologizing and start aiming.