The Poet and the Philosopher

I missed the weekend by a couple days, but now I'm back with another post discussing the nature of poetry. This is going to be somewhat briefer because I'm still in the middle of editing two books, and preparing to host a young adult philosophy discussion on Thursday.

In the essay The Vocation of Poetry that appears in my book I have a section that differentiates poetry from other arts through its affinity with philosophy. This post will be a summary of that argument.

• Poetry is uniue among the arts because it does not work directly on the senses (supposing we're talking about printed poetry or poetry read in a normal voice, rather than a sung ballad). Flute-playing, architecture, painting, and baking all achieve their effects through a specific sense which they exploit. Poetry may be received either through the eyes by reading or the ears by being read to, but it does not have its full poetic effect until the imagination re-presents the images in the mind. Thus poetry is in a sense the most intellectual of the arts.
• Poetry also is a more intellectual art because it can use abstract language directly. A figure representing Justice may appear in a painting, but a poet may write an ode to Justice directly. By saying poetry is the more intellectual art I do not mean to depreciate any other medium. On some level is is to the disadvantage of poetry, because it makes it less visceral, less immediate in its effect.
• Because poetry is the more intellectual art, it is closer to philosophy.
• Because poetry is an art that by its nature is close to philosophy, it forms something of a bridge between the mind and the heart. In my essay I also describe it as "the mode of expression in which the inner unity of beauty and truth is made manifest."
• The poet and the philosopher should not try to do each other's jobs. The result turns out to be bad. We ruin poetry on the one hand by reducing it to versified philosophy, and philosophy on the other hand by undermining its need for systematic analysis. They compliment each other, but still have different ends as well as means.

I'll close this with a quotation from The Man Who was Thursday, "if the Secretary stood for the philosopher who loves the original formless light, Syme was a type of the poet who seeks always to make the light in special shapes, to split it up into sun and star. The philosopher may sometimes love the infinite; the poet always loves the finite. For him the great moment is not the creation of light, but the creation of the sun and moon." In my essay I discuss why this is not quite accurate, but it remains a lovely meditation and a reasonable summary.