Is poetry dead? Or, in the age of the Internet, does it offer us what nothing else can?

There are few opportunities in today’s world for a private audience with a personal hero, but the last appearance of the poet W.S. Merwin as the country’s poet laureate was, for an unusual number of people, one of them. The appearance itself was a rare one: At 82 and living on a former pineapple plantation on Maui, Merwin was well past the stage of his life when he might have regularly stumped for poetry, if he was ever that sort of poet — which he was not. And he was a bit of a recluse.

But Merwin was slated for a rare double bill: In addition to giving a reading for the “closing of the literary season,” as the Library of Congress was advertising it, he would also be holding a book-signing. In front of a packed house in Coolidge Auditorium, Merwin spoke for nearly an hour, reading a few poems, including one of his about words yet to be written, which ends,“it could be that there’s only one word / and it’s all we need / it’s here in this pencil / every pencil in the world is like this.”

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After the reading, as he took his place behind a desk on the top floor of the building’s Great Hall, the line was already forming. What happened there, between the poet and his acolytes, was curious. Merwin may be reclusive on principle, but in person he is magnetic — warm, intimate, irresistibly charming. He gazed up at each new face with fresh interest, as though at a long-lost friend.

And each person approached the desk with unconcealed reverence, as though at the end of a pilgrimage. What they wanted to tell him was always, in some way, about themselves: “You speak in my voice,” a woman said. “Your first book was published the year I was born,” another said. One woman asked him to dedicate a book to her friend’s dog, who had recently died; she read what he had written, and her eyes filled with tears.

An hour or so into the line, a man with a soft drawl told Merwin he appreciated his passion for preserving nature; he had been working to replant a family farm whose forests had been cut down. Merwin perked up. “What kinds of trees?” he asked.

“Mostly oaks and ashes,” the man said.

“I’ve had some old trees that have been good friends of mine,” Merwin said. Before him, the line stretched interminably. Well into the evening, the director of the Library of Congress’s Poetry and Literature Center gave Merwin the opportunity to bow out, but he declined. He had been sitting at the desk for two and a half hours by the time the last person left.

***

The idea that poetry is the deadest of the dying arts, an airless attic where overwrought metaphors go to dry up and drop their wings, is perennial. A 2003 column in Newsweek — “Poetry Is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care?” — was bitterly and defensively refuted (mainly by poets), but it tapped a rich vein of suspicion nationwide that the last time poetry really mattered was long ago, perhaps sometime in the ’50s, when poets were literary celebrities and household names, and schoolchildren knew reams of verse by heart.

It’s true that the mid-20th century was a heyday of sorts for American poetry. Poets were published and reviewed in daily newspapers and general-interest magazines, and their book releases were significant events. The poetry scene that most people knew was made up of a few highly celebrated poets (with notable exceptions, usually white and male) writing a few kinds of poetry (“the raw and the cooked,” as Robert Lowell famously described it).