Pope Francis: Dear Poets, Help Us Dream

By Pope Francis

Dear poets, I know that you hunger for meaning, and that is why you reflect on how faith questions life. This "meaning" cannot be reduced to a concept. No, it is a comprehensive meaning that encompasses poetry, symbols, and feelings. The true meaning is not found in the dictionary—that's the meaning of words, and words are merely tools to express everything within us. Throughout my life, I have cherished many poets and writers, especially Dante, Dostoevsky, and others. I also must thank my students at the Colegio de la Inmaculada Concepción in Santa Fe, with whom I shared my readings when I was young and teaching literature. The words of writers helped me understand myself, the world, my people, and even deepened my understanding of the human heart, my personal faith journey, and my pastoral mission, even now in my ministry. Thus, literary words are like a thorn in the heart that moves you to contemplation and sets you on a journey. Poetry is open; it throws you into another realm.

In light of this personal experience, today I would like to share some thoughts with you on the importance of your service.

The first thing I want to express is this: you are eyes that see and dream. Not only do you see, but you also dream. A person who has lost the ability to dream lacks poetry, and life without poetry does not work. We humans yearn for a new world that we may never fully see with our own eyes, yet we desire it, seek it, and dream of it. A Latin American writer once said that we have two eyes: one of flesh and the other of glass. With the eye of flesh, we see what is before us; with the eye of glass, we see what we dream. Woe to us if we stop dreaming—woe to us!

The artist is someone who, with their eyes, both sees and dreams; they perceive more deeply, prophesy, and announce a different way of seeing and understanding the things before us. Indeed, poetry does not speak of reality from abstract principles but rather by listening to reality itself: work, love, death, and all the little and great things that fill life. Yours is — to quote Paul Claudel — an "eye that listens." Art is an antidote to a mindset of calculation and uniformity; it challenges our imagination, our way of seeing and understanding things. In this sense, the Gospel itself is an artistic challenge. It carries that "revolutionary" energy that you are familiar with and express through your genius with words that protest, call out, and cry. The Church, too, needs your genius because it needs to protest, call out, and cry.

However, I would also like to say a second thing: you are the voice of human anxieties. Often, these anxieties are buried deep within the heart. You know well that artistic inspiration is not only comforting but also unsettling because it presents both the beautiful realities of life and the tragic ones. Art is the fertile ground where the “polar oppositions” of reality — as Romano Guardini called them — are expressed, always requiring a creative and flexible language capable of conveying powerful messages and visions. For example, consider when Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, tells the story of a little boy, the son of a servant, who throws a stone and hits one of his master’s dogs. The master then sets all the dogs on the boy. He runs, trying to escape the fury of the pack, but ultimately, he is torn apart under the satisfied gaze of the general and the desperate eyes of his mother.

This scene has tremendous artistic and political power: it speaks to the reality of yesterday and today, of wars, social conflicts, and our personal selfishness. It is just one poetic passage that challenges us. And I'm not only referring to the social critique in that passage. I speak of the tensions of the soul, the complexity of decisions, the contradictions of existence. There are things in life that, at times, we can’t even understand or find the right words for: this is your fertile ground, your field of action.

This is also the place where one often encounters God. It’s an experience that is always "overflowing": you cannot contain it; you feel it, and it goes beyond; it always overflows, like a basin constantly filling with water until it spills over.

That is what I want to ask of you today as well: go beyond the closed and defined borders, be creative, do not domesticate your anxieties or those of humanity. I fear this process of taming because it stifles creativity, it stifles poetry. With the words of poetry, gather the restless desires that inhabit the human heart so they do not grow cold or die out. This work allows the Spirit to act, creating harmony amidst the tensions and contradictions of human life, keeping the fire of good passions alive, and contributing to the growth of beauty in all its forms, beauty that is expressed precisely through the richness of the arts.

This is your work as poets: to give life, to give form, to give words to all that human beings live, feel, dream, and suffer, creating harmony and beauty. It is a work that can also help us better understand God as the great "poet" of humanity. Will you face criticism? That’s okay, bear the weight of criticism while also learning from it. But never stop being original, creative. Never lose the wonder of being alive.

So, eyes that dream, voices of human anxieties; and therefore, you also have a great responsibility. And what is it? It’s the third thing I want to say: you are among those who shape our imagination. Your work has an impact on the spiritual imagination of the people of our time. Today, we need the genius of a new language, powerful stories, and images.

I, too, feel the need, I confess, for poets capable of shouting the Gospel message to the world, of making us see Jesus, making us touch him, making us feel him immediately close, presenting him to us as a living reality, and making us grasp the beauty of his promise. Your work can help heal our imagination from everything that obscures it or, even worse, from everything that seeks to domesticate it. To tame the image of Christ by putting him in a frame and hanging him on the wall is to destroy his image. His promise, instead, helps our imagination: it helps us reimagine our lives, our story, and our future. And here I recall another masterpiece by Dostoevsky, small but containing all these things: Notes from Underground. It holds all the greatness and all the sorrows of humanity, all the miseries together. This is the path.

Dear poets, thank you for your service. Continue dreaming, questioning, imagining words and visions that help us understand the mystery of human life and guide our societies toward beauty and universal fraternity.

Help us open our imagination so that it transcends the narrow confines of the self and opens up to the entire reality, with all its facets, thus becoming open to the holy mystery of God. Move forward, without tiring, with creativity and courage!

I bless you.

* Pope Francis wished to deliver for this publication a reflection on poetry, revising a speech of his originally conceived as a discourse that was delivered in the Clementine Hall of the Apostolic Palace on 27 May 2023. He felt today that he wanted to confirm the expressions used then, adapting them in the form of a ‘Letter to Poets’. Here is that discourse addressed to participants at the conference promoted by ‘La Civiltà Cattolica’ with Georgetown University