Mental health problems continue to rise, according to daily media reports. The Spanish Medicines Agency warns, with concern, of the continued growth, since the year 2000, of the consumption of anxiolytics, sedatives and antidepressants. Psychologists and psychiatrists relate these disorders to the lack of meaning in life. Human beings are eagerly seeking to understand and be understood; to find or recover the drive for meaning that financial aid to live; to have a support that can guide our efforts and prevent us from sinking into despair.

And one of the sources of meaning, along with religion, is precisely poetry, that employment of language that seeks to capture, as Bellamy has written, "what remains fixed and stable to give meaning to our lives. It is the prophets and poets, "those powerful mediators and messengers of meaning," who have the capacity to fulfill or attenuate that human thirst for the infinite. From them "come all our experiences of meaning, that in which we believe even when its truth is not and can never be 'verified' or accounted for with the financial aid of the methods of experimental science" (Jean Grondin), that idol which aspires to dominate everything, but which remains absolutely mute in the face of questions about good and evil, and before the question of the meaning of life in general.

But the question of meaning always arises anew, since it defines us and is found in the most intimate part of our being and being in the world. And it is naive to think that science can illuminate the question of meaning. It is art, poetry, apart from religion, that have the power to discover for us a form of truth different from that of science, to question us, to touch our hearts and to tell us, with Rilke's verse, "you must change your life". With the poet Gabriel D'Annunzio, it can be affirmed that a successful combination of words can be more medicinal, healthier, than a Chemistry formula.

Poets, regardless of their creeds, have been the most astute at the time of intuiting the wounds opened by materialistic ideologies in the conception of the person; wounds that lead to absurdity and meaninglessness. And poetry nourishes the attempt, bordering on the divine, to offer, filled in a harmonious way, what the human being requires to live in fullness, to satisfy that "nostalgia for a spiritual and corporeal harmony broken and banished centuries ago from among the people" (Luis Cernuda). It is no other ambition that all poets have harbored, the one that Jorge Guillén sculpted in these verses: "The voice in erect light / I require to integrate my life".

Poetry, the great literature of all times and latitudes, that fragile bequest, those words that help to live better (Todorov), possess, besides a recognized elevating power, a healing virtue; first of all, as Novalis wrote, from the wounds inflicted by pure rationality, for life is composed of more than mere reason; and "a book with life has an unimaginable power of healing. There are books that are like mountain shelters or oxygen bottles. Portable pharmacies" (Jesús Montiel).

We often complain, and rightly so, of the employment of language by many politicians, of its use as a weapon, of its polarizing internship , of its expressive and infamous degradation. A speech, in short, located at the antipodes of the poetic word, because if "poetry is the threshold of the word from above, [...] insult is from below" (José Mateos).

For Christians, the ultimate meaning of life was offered to us by the Word, the Word of God, who became flesh to redeem us from the evil of sin and the abyss of anguish and meaninglessness. Did the late Oscar Wilde sense something of this when he said that "the place of Christ is among the poets", or Franz Kafka when he defined the poet as "a living telegraph between God and men"?