Spirit operates in nature, as Emerson suggested, and poetry could be iewed as a form of religious thought.... The language of poetry can ground us in spiritual and moral realities, offering the consolations of philosophy... For me, it is a continuation of the holy scriptures, the kind of language one studies for insights and inspiration, for spiritual direction, for correction. Poets write in the line of poetry..... without [poetry] we can live only partially, not fully conscious of the possibilities (emotional and intellectual) that life affords.
Jay Parini, in Why Poetry Matters, 2008, New Haven: Yale University Press, p. xiii-xiv
God imagines the world, and human beings and human beings---who were created in the image of God---replicate this process.
Ibid, p. 10
[According to Walt Whitman]*, anyone can appreciate the natural world, but the poet must do more than merely point to "the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects". All me and women see this luxuriance, he maintains. But the poet, above others, must "indicate the path between reality and their souls". It is in the articulation of spiritual lines between the human mind and the world of external reality that poets find their truest calling.
Jay Parini, 2008, pp. 16-17
* in Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855
No comments:
Post a Comment