“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. / About the dark times.” Why has poetry been so important in periods of political defeat?

This is a question I thought about often when I was teaching in a prison in New Jersey, an experience that led me to consider 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: