Excerpts: Functions of Poetry (or the poet)

For [Longinus]* poetry makes it possible for people to live more intensely, with a greater awareness of the life that confronts them.

__ Jay Parini, Why Poetry Matters, 2008, New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 7.

* Longinus was a critic whose treatsie "On the Sublime" was translated by W. Rhys Roberts (London: Cambridge University Press, 1899). Almost nothing else is known about him, according to Parini.

Power, says Rich*, is essential in the poet, in poetry itself; but this power "is not power of domination, but just access to sources." This means connecting readers to the history of language itself, to the history of human encounters with the violent realities that surround them, and to the history of human success in the struggle for spiritual survival."

Jay Parini, 2008, p. 22.

*Adrienne Rich, quoted from On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978.