Poets are the legislators of the unacknowledged world.
The poet, says Sidney*, works through metaphors. Scientists, historians, and philosophers do this as well, whether or not they acknowledge it. Here Sydney gives poets the upper hand because they know what they are doing. They work in metaphors self-consciously, having learned how. Indeed, Sydney lifts the poet well above these others, who are tied to literal realities that they can only imitate badly and probably distort. The poet furnishes the world with fresh knowledge,..... creating figures on the page that become a substance themselves, interpreting reality as much as reflecting it.
....the excellence of every art is in its intensity.
John Keats in Jay Parini, 2008, p. 35.
___ George Oppen in Jay Parini, 2008, Why Poetry Matters, p. 22
"Poetry extends the boundaries of thought by extending the boundaries of expression itself. Poets articulate thoughts and feelings in ways that clarify both; they hold a mirror of sorts up to the mind if not to the world..."
___ Jay Parini, 2008, p. 8
"A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it, ... by way of the poem itself ... all the way over to the reader."
___ Charles Olson, in R. Rogers, Metaphor: A psychonalytic view
The poet, says Sidney*, works through metaphors. Scientists, historians, and philosophers do this as well, whether or not they acknowledge it. Here Sydney gives poets the upper hand because they know what they are doing. They work in metaphors self-consciously, having learned how. Indeed, Sydney lifts the poet well above these others, who are tied to literal realities that they can only imitate badly and probably distort. The poet furnishes the world with fresh knowledge,..... creating figures on the page that become a substance themselves, interpreting reality as much as reflecting it.
___ Jay Parini, 2008, pp. 10-11
Compared with others, the poet is "endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness" (Wordsworth, 1800, Perface to Lyrical Ballads).
----
Coleridge held that "literary invention involves the natural, unplanned, and unconscious process by which things grow"*. Like a plant, the poet gathers material from the atmosphere around him and puts out branches and leaves. The poem itself, also like a plant, begins with a seed or "germ".
___ Jay Parini, 2008, p. 14
* Sir Philip Sydney wrote famously in defense of poetry in the "Apology for Poetry".
When a poet;s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary mind's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinzoa, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other...; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.
T. S. Eliot in his essay on Metaphysical poets (in Selected Essays,1950), taken from Parini, 2008, p. 18.
[Poetry may be defined as] a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems .... to have something to do with self-preservation...
Also:
the pressure of reality is .... the determining factor in the artistic character of an .... individual. The resistance to this pressure or its evasion in the case of individuals of extraordinary imagination cancels the pressure so far as those individuals are concerned.
Wallace Stevens, 1951, in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, taken from Parini, 2008, p. 20.
....the excellence of every art is in its intensity.
John Keats in Jay Parini, 2008, p. 35.
[All poems should be] short poems; it being impossible that a feeling so intense ... should sustain itself at its highest elevation for long.
John Stuart Mill, in Jay Parini, 2008, p. 35The poem ... draws the senses to a fine point, to a pitch of expression. It involves a level of concentration rarely found in prose. Ideally, it returns us to our deepest concerns, our most intense and original feelings...
Jay Parini, 2008, p. 36
... poets do not really have ideas at all, they have perceptions, intuitions, emotional convictions.
Middleton Murry, in Rogers, Metaphor: a psychoanalytic view. p. 14
Colerdige [supposed artistic thought] to be dual in nature, combining a "streamy", associative, pictorial kind of thought with a more rigorous and rational type. Robert Rogers, Metaphor: A psychoanalytic view, p. 14.
Colerdige [thought that this other type] performs the adjunctive tasks of asserting control and giving direction to the other type [that is pictorial thought]. same as above.
[Poetry] must appeal to emotions with the charm of a direct impression, flashing through regions where the intellect can only grope. And. "The best poetry deals not only with natural images but with lofty thoughts, spiritual suggestions and obscure relations."
Ernest Fenellose in R. Rogers' Metaphor: A psychoanalytic view, p. 35
[it] appears to be that poetic experience depends on a "difference of potential", a kind of discrepancy between two modes or moods of consciousness.
Owen Barfield in same as above.
According to Colerdige an ideal poet has the potential to bring "the whole soul of man in activity."
in Same as above.
The power of the poet to blend, or fuse, or synthesize disparate entities into some kind of unity reveals itself, says Coleridge, in "the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities", including "the idea with the image" and "a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order".
Rogers, 1978, p. 36
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