The Spirit and the Sign: How Great Poetry Works
☾
There are two ways in which we relate to the mysterious reality which we inhabit, the first is through the symbols of words and representation, the second through the is-ness of consciousness, the inward givenness of you, a wholeness of all-at-once meaning and sense that is you in each moment, as present as the air you breathe.
Poetry in its immediate form contains only the former. It is by definition an intentional arrangement of words, a container of symbols. Yet to anyone who has known or appreciated what it is to be moved by poetry you know it contains something in common with the latter kind of human sense, indeed even something in common with music, a wholeness of meaning and feeling not reducible to its components.
Importantly, this sense is not subjective or arbitrary, while we all have our own personal islands of meaning we can speak about great poetry collectively, indeed the storehouse of myth, stories and song that have formed us as a culture and in the wider world are testament to this. Great art endures because it works, it really means something that you don’t just make up as the reader. The abstractions and forms of meaning: beauty, goodness, love, truth, are as universal as the river and universe of our minds, part of the very water of our inwardness and sense of what it means to be alive.
