“In the dark times / Will there also be singing?” asked Bertolt Brecht in 1939. The answer, of course, is yes: “There will also be singing / Of the dark times.” Why has poetry been so important in periods of political defeat?

This is a question I thought about often during Donald Trump’s first presidency, and which comes up again now. It was common then for people to say we were living in dark times, as it no doubt will be in the months and years to come. I had my own reasons for thinking about this: I was writing a PhD about political disillusionment after the English Civil War (1642–49) and how it led people to seek refuge in poetry. At the same time, I was teaching in a prison in New Jersey, an experience that led me to think about literature’s relationship to despair in a practical way. I wondered, as I wrote my syllabus each semester, which texts would speak to my students without depressing them.

One day, I brought into class the opening lines of John Milton’s Paradise Lost:

Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste

Brought death into our world . . .

I explained how the poem’s rhythm works by alternating between stressed and unstressed syllables. Then I asked the class to read it aloud with me: “Of MAN’S first DIS-o-BE-dience AND the FRUIT.” After we did this, one of the students — I’ll call him Mark — put up his hand.

The first line can be read disobediently, Mark said. I asked him to say more. To make the rhythm work, he explained, “disobedience” must have four syllables, but it could also have five: dis-o-be-di-ence. The reader must choose to obey. This was a brilliant insight: a choice at the beginning of Milton’s epic between obedience and disobedience, order and rebellion. Mark had recognized the poem’s major themes after only seeing the smallest fragment of it.

Milton wrote Paradise Lost at a dark time in his own life. Halfway through, the poet tells the reader that he is “In Darkness compassed round.” Milton had championed the democratic republic set up after the English Civil War and the execution of the king. But it had failed, and in 1660 the monarchy had returned. Milton was imprisoned and then fined. Not only that: he had gone blind, and lost his wife and infant son to illness. In that dark time, he achieved something extraordinary.

Milton produced a ten-thousand-line epic without being able to see it on the page — composing it at night and then dictating it to secretaries or his long-suffering daughters. Paradise Lost is famously dark: beginning in the “darkness visible” of hell, where Satan languishes after waging a failed rebellion against God. It is also dark in another sense — using allegory, often referred to in the Renaissance as a kind of “dark writing” — a story with another, political meaning that is signified obscurely so that only devoted readers can make sense of it.

At first, Satan seems to be an allegory for the failed English Revolution, and when he claims that God is a tyrant, he sounds a lot like Milton, railing against kings. This allegory tempts us to sympathize with Satan. Is Satan a freedom fighter or a tyrant? Does he stand for Oliver Cromwell or King Charles I? Should we see in him a revolutionary grandeur or the source of all evil? By the end, it is clear that Satan is not a freedom fighter but a tyrant. The allegory was subtle enough not to provoke the king’s censor, who worried over a few lines but let it pass. In time, this poem born in darkness would reach readers living in their own dark times.

Soon after its publication in 1667, Paradise Lost became a classic. Many readers were content to forget the poet’s radical politics and enjoy his poem. Then, in the late eighteenth century, it assumed a more political guise, taken up by revolutionaries in the United States, France, Haiti, and elsewhere. It wasn’t only the poem’s political arguments that granted it this long and rich afterlife. It was its dark allegory, which generated many different, often contradictory interpretations. Some radical readers identified with the rebellious Satan; others saw in him the very qualities they were fighting against. The poem’s darkness allowed it to reach so many later readers, including my student Mark.

That same semester, another student said something that helped me to understand the meaning of this poetic darkness. We were studying Paul Celan’s famous Holocaust poem “Death Fugue,” which describes a Nazi concentration camp where the Jewish inhabitants are forced to make music for their guards. Born in Bukovina, a province of Romania, Celan wrote the poem in 1945, after the death of his parents in Nazi concentration camps. The poem, written in German, has a hypnotic waltz rhythm (in Pierre Joris’s translation):

Black milk of morning we drink you evenings

we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you at night

we drink and we drink . . .

For the camp’s inhabitants, the smoke rising into the sky is both a means of death and of escape. “Death Fugue” is one of the most powerful poems I have ever read, and I had no idea what my students would make of it.

We discussed the poem as a class, but the most memorable response came while the students were completing a course evaluation. One student — I’ll call him David — walked up to my desk. A thin, bespectacled man in his fifties with a serious demeanor, he sat down in a chair and started talking. He spoke about growing up “in the back alleys,” where people did heinous things without any feeling at all. Prison was no less full of temptation — to anger, retaliation, despair. His cellmate being bullied in the corridors. The brutality of the guards. He had been inside for thirty-one years.

“In here it’s difficult to feel much about anyone else,” David said. But Celan’s poem had “touched his soul.” It had helped him to feel something when he watched the news, for the people caught up in the crisis on the southern border.

I was struck by the fact Celan’s poem had done this, rather than one of the more positive, American poems we had read in class. This dark poem had prompted in David new feelings for people different from himself, just as he was different from Celan. This is one of the paradoxes of poetry — that it is written for an unknown reader and achieves a kind of intimacy across gaps in time, place, language, and identity. This, too, is a kind of darkness.

In 1959, Paul Celan made notes for a conference paper, “On the Darkness of Poetry.” The paper was never finished, but Celan’s notes were published recently in Microliths, a volume of posthumous prose translated, again, by Pierre Joris. While fragmentary, the notes are an extensive expression of his distinctive thinking about poetry. Celan writes: “The poem wants to be understood: it is because it is dark that it wants to be understood.”

Celan, whose poetry is often far from easy to understand, insists that poetic darkness is not an obstacle but, instead, the bearer of a wish to communicate. As with Milton, the wish to find a reader mirrors Celan’s hope for a social revolution. Elsewhere, he compared his poems to a handshake, or a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea — a gesture involving a kind of desperate faith, but one that many readers, including my student David, have met, reaching out in their interpretations to greet it.

It is understandable to feel despair after a defeat, especially when we think of the people whose lives are made vulnerable by the US domestic and foreign policies. But hope, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “is given to us for the sake of the hopeless.” The poetry written in dark times is proof of something stronger than hope — a faith in the possibility of a world where things could be otherwise.