All writing aspires to the condition of poetry

Every writer wants to be a poet in this sense: that their words may be read as if language were still a new experience. Every writer aims at a living language that will live in the reader as fresh meaning. To bring a reader into communion with the writer, through language, sharing in the vivid experience of a thought, a feeling, an intuition, is the desire of all writers.

It is an essentially poetic spirit that, even in prose, manifests itself when we want to say something in such a way that it impresses upon the reader new knowledge and new understanding. To captivate, to carry away, to possess.

All great poetry asks us to be possessed by it.
—Harold Bloom

What sort of language possesses? It is not the literal, prosaic language that seeks only to communicate what is already known. It is not language that is already made, but language that makes and renews. Language that possesses is language that figures the reader’s imagination, that makes the concept, the image, the idea, real to the mind. Language that brings the experience into view, as if appearing from a fog, that reveals the idea as a thing of substance, as a real, solid object.

Poetry is that art of figuration, the art of shaping the imagination.

The poet, says Ricoeur, “is that artisan who sustains and shapes imagery using no means other than language.”

What is said poetically cannot be said any other way. Everyone knows this. We have all heard the anecdote of Robert Frost who, asked what his poem meant after a reading, responded, “Should I read it again in worser English?” Or Auden who, under the same circumstances, simply reread the poem. In poetry, the way something is said is its figuring.¹ To paraphrase it is to lose what it is. Its essence is untranslatable. Every writer wants to write a line like this, even if only occasionally.

Even those who would happily sell the film rights to their book would still like to believe their story, the way they wrote it, contained something inimitable, what Bloom called inevitability. A line, a passage, that could not be written any other way, one that embodied the writer’s expression in the reader, that formed a clear and distinct idea in the mind. Such a quality is the mold into which an idea is cast that gives it reality and substance.

Monet “Valley of the Nervia” 1884

What is that which is untranslatable in poetry? In a word, interiority.

Consider the opening of Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight.”

The Frost performs its secret ministry

Such a line could not exist as anything but language. It cannot be filmed, nor set to music, though the subject of the whole poem is quite cinematic.

It’s February 1798. Coleridge is up late in his cottage in Nether Stowey, disturbed by the possibility of a French invasion.² His infant son Hartley is cradled in his arms, fast asleep. His gaze falls on the hearth, on the sooty fire within the grate, as snowdrift piles up outside. He recalls his childhood growing up in the city. His thoughts then turn to the hope that his son will grow up in the countryside, surrounded by nature.

But thou, my babe! Shalt wander, like a breeze,
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself,
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

One could certainly visualize the poem as a short film. All the details I’ve given paint a picture in the mind, of the fire, of Coleridge and his son, of the snow outside falling on a cozy cottage. One could even imagine a voiceover, a recitation of the poem, so that we might hear the inner thoughts of Coleridge as we see him looking at the fire and then at his son.

But there would still be something crucial missing in such a representation, and it is precisely the interiority the poem produces when one reads it and experiences it as language. The line, The Frost performs its secret ministry, cannot be translated visually. No amount of shots of snow falling before lampposts, or mounded beside a cottage, however crystalline and reverential, could recreate the meaning of the line.

It’s not merely an image. It is a figure of the passions of a soul. To perceive it one needs what Coleridge called the “organ of inward sense,” that faculty which has “the power of acquainting itself with invisible realities or spiritual objects.”³ Such a faculty gives rise to interiority, the inscape of Hopkins, the imagined interior of Stevens. To understand it is to understand the activity and design of language upon the imagination, for it is language that both casts the figures and creates the space for them in the mind.

Poetic language is language that makes. What it makes is what Heidegger called the “house of Being,” a place in the mind where we “come face-to-face with the possibility of an experience with Being.”⁴ I wrote about this in more detail in series of previous posts. The line The Frost performs its secret ministry gives shape to a sensibility hitherto unfigured. The form of the poem itself makes known the same apprehensions and fears and hope that Coleridge knew as he looked at the fire, and the frost, and the child. By such figures of language we come face-to-face with an experience of Being. Hence, to supplement the line with images, as a film might, would be to lose the sense of interiority that the language as language fosters.

Monet “Waves Breaking” 1881

James Marriott recently argued in a viral post that we have entered a post-literate society.

The dawn of the post-literate society

People are reading less and less in favor of visual media like film, television, YouTube, and Tiktok. Marriott argues that this will lead to, among other things, the decline of cognitive abilities, higher order thinking, creativity, liberal democracy, and human flourishing. He cites studies which show declines in problem-solving tests and difficulties paraphrasing excerpts of Bleak House.

This decline in literacy is really a decline in the imagination that poetic language engenders. It’s not that students couldn’t read Bleak House, after all, but that they couldn’t comprehend it. They could not imagine aurally the voice of the author who wrote it, and so paraphrase it in their own words. Likewise, the ability to perform complex thinking is not merely a matter of writing down the thought, but of holding it in the mind so that it can be “seen” and “worked on.”

Interiority is the precondition for all creativity, empathy, and rationality, for it is in that imaginal space that such activities are undertaken. One cultivates interiority through language, specifically poetic language. Prosaic language, language that is already made, presupposes a place where such things can be put. But if one has spent one’s entire life merely watching and looking at things, there will be nowhere into which they can be put. It’s our relationship to poetic language that shapes and figures the inside of us.

Writers themselves understand the value of such language. It is the thing they aspire to most of all, whatever genre they happen to write. Amongst that which they know how to say, they are always striving to say what they have not yet been able to put into words. That reaching for, and grasping at, the right way of saying what has not yet been said, is the poetic spirit. And when they have got it right, when they have shaped it right in the mind, it is the fulfillment of that spirit which brings us closer to Being, closer to ourselves.

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1. All the fun’s in how you say the thing, as Timothy Steele says.

2. It did not come to pass, though the government and The Morning Post were certain it would.

3. from Volume 1 of The Friend, a periodical Coleridge started in November 1808 and that ran for 28 issues before ending in March 1810. Coleridge called the faculty Reason, which has a slightly different sense than the norm. Like Kant, Coleridge was a rationalist, and believed in “pure thought” and “pure ideas” unconnected with sensory experience. He writes about it elsewhere, in the Biographia Literaria and in his work on Logic, and it would require a separate post to discuss it in detail. What is interesting, and perhaps relevant to this discussion, is that for Coleridge an “idea” is something in which all distinction between subject and object disappears. Such a thing is only possible in language, which is part of its untranslatability.

4. from his lectures On the Way to Language.