Of Poetry and Reality

“nothing on this earth more beautiful...”

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In the inaugural post for the Poetic Knowledge newsletter, I explained, with help from James Taylor, that “poetic knowledge … is not strictly speaking a knowledge of poems.” Rather, it is knowledge deriving from a unitive, resonant encounter with Reality as something “beautiful, awful (awefull), spontaneous, mysterious,” something that captivates and inspires and transforms us “when the mind, through the senses and emotions, sees in delight, or even in terror, the significance of what is really there.” So poetic knowledge is not strictly speaking about poems, but this newsletter, having the same name, is about poems (and literature more generally). This somewhat paradoxical situation deserves, I think, further comment, and in this essay I will discuss why poetic literature is essential to poetic knowledge, and therefore to the success of human education and the full flourishing of human life.

Dr. Taylor insisted that poetic knowledge is distinct from “poetry,” where poetry is understood as “the crafted thing called verse.” However, almost in the same breath he notes “how Homer has Odysseus penetrate the ordinary, sensory details of a banquet to reveal the poetic, transcendent significance.” Here he refers to a passage from the Odyssey, one of the world’s most renowned and revered poems, where Odysseus declares that we reach

the deepest of delights when, at a feast,
beside the tables heaped with bread and meat,
men, seated in due order, fill the hall
and listen to a harper: joy takes all,
and the cupbearer draws wine from the bowl
and brings it round and brims the cups: my soul
finds nothing on this earth more beautiful.¹

Taylor explains that “this penetrating gaze into the transcendent nature of things … is essentially a poetic act,” and it just so happens that these poetic acts occur “everywhere” in Homer’s poetry. We see, then, that the distinction between poetic knowledge and poetic texts is not a separation. Rather, good literature awakens us, as nothing else can, to a poetic experience of material, social, and spiritual realities; it forms us, with unique efficacy, in the modes of thought and perception that enable us to look with a “penetrating gaze into the transcendent nature of things.” It is entirely possible for a human being to look at a sunrise and see only a sunrise. But for a human being whose mind has been molded by the metaphors, images, and prosodic music of the poets, it is quite difficult to see only a sunrise. That which is seen with the eye will be received also by the heart, as a symbol of hope, or as a sign of God’s unfailing Providence, or simply as a visual counterpart to the enduring beauty of Homer’s language: “As soon as Dawn’s rose fingers touched the sky, I went to pray with fervor to the gods…” The life-changing potential of this poetic disposition shines all the brighter if you, following the example of medieval Christians, consider the material realm to be first and foremost a vast treasury of symbols revealing the mysteries and eternal destinies of the immaterial realm.

I also want to be clear that I am not departing from James Taylor’s (or John Senior’s) ideas by proposing the central role of literature in poetic education—and by “education” I mean growth in wisdom, virtue, and happiness, which is something that should continue long after youth and, indeed, until death. Senior, though perhaps known by some as a philosopher or a classicist, was an English professor and wrote his doctoral dissertation on modern literature. And it was Taylor himself who suggested to me that education could be fundamentally literary, at a time when I imagined the ideal school as a place more in the “great books” tradition of classical texts, erudite treatises, and hard-hitting analytical discussions. He said to me one day, and I’m paraphrasing here, “What about something more medieval, more Benedictine, with education built around literature?” This was before I had read his work on poetic knowledge, and before I knew about Senior’s “good books before the great books” paradigm. Indeed, how very little I knew about anything back then, in my mid-twenties! It turns out that growing up takes a lot longer, and is a lot harder, than I once thought.

My understanding is that some people (and by people I mostly mean men) would rather not be “sensitive.” I sympathize; sentimentality is not something I wish to encourage, and I am not by nature much swayed by emotions. My Germanic blood, like the North Sea, tends to be rather cold, and my Viking ancestors were ruthless marauders whose heroes, in the Beowulf tradition, might tear off a monster’s earm ond eaxle—“arm and shoulder”—with their bare hands then display the severed limb for all to see and admire.

But being “sensitive,” in my usage, is not about being sentimental or overly emotional or easily hurt. It’s about being sense-itive to the world around you—in other words, it’s about knowing how to feel, according to the full meaning of the Latin verb from which “sense” derives, sentire: “to feel,” that is, “to discern by the senses; to perceive; to notice; to experience; to undergo, endure, suffer.” A poetic experience of human life presupposes a well-developed sensitivity to all the elemental realities of which Reality itself is composed: sights and sounds, actions and events, rhythms and cycles, melodies and harmonies, persons and personalities, body and spirit, joys and sorrows, triumphs and tragedies, birthing and breathing and ageing and dying. And poetic literature—from folktales to classical epics, from Shakespearean drama to the great narratives of the Bible—is our primary means of acquiring, refining, and perfecting this sensitivity. The metaphorical thought, eloquent language, artistic forms, pleasing music, memorable characters, and well-crafted stories of the poets teach us to discover and savor poetry in the “real” world. Thus begins the Iliad:

Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.

If the world is open to us as a book, as a poem, as a song conducted by the Creator and sung by the Muse, then we will want to live in that very world, rather than in a prison of apathy, a tidal flow of distractions, or a nexus of simulacra that never truly satisfy us, often betray us, and may destroy us.

Francis Bethel, in his biography of John Senior, wrote that everything Senior “had learned from philosophy and literature was summarized in the Benedictine ora et labora [‘pray and work’], which grounds the whole man in the soil while drawing him to the stars.” Literature, rightly understood and wisely employed, is not an escape to the land of make-believe, or an exercise in chronic overstimulation, or an invitation to wallow in pleasant trivialities while the hard work of building virtue and loving one another is neglected. As Dr. Senior knew, a well-ordered encounter with authentic literature enriches our relationship with Reality as humankind has always known it: the soil beneath us, the earth all around us, the people right next to us, the heavens above us.

And let us not forget that if a Benedictine monk speaks of “prayer and work,” the preeminent acts of prayer required by his Rule come from the divine office—that is, from an artistic arrangement of sung texts, most of which are, in the strict sense, poems. We call them the Psalms, and one of them says this:

Fashioning mountains in thy strength,
      thou art girded with power;
thou settest in stillness the rushing of seas,
      the roar of their waves, the tumult of nations,
and those that dwell at the ends of the earth
      shall stand in awe at thy signs.
...
Thou hast crowned the year of thy goodness,
      and thy fields abound with richness;
the wild meadows shall drip with water,
      the hills shall be encircled with joy;
the pastures are clothed with flocks of sheep,
      and the valleys are shrouded in wheat:
            they shout for joy, and they sing.

1. Odyssey quotations are taken from Allen Mandelbaum’s superb translation. The Iliad quotation is from Robert Fagles’ translation.