I am only just warming up to poetry now (in my mid-30s) and found this intriguing. I’m sure it will impact my experience with poetry in the future and for that, I’m grateful.
An unusually thoughtful piece on poetry, Robert- thank you. Perhaps I would have liked to hear a bit more about the conscious practice of poetry (rhetoric, to the ancients), but I enjoyed this. Thank you.
Thank you Freeman. I think there's something to be said about Wittgenstein's view of language and poetry, as you've described it. Poetry does make games out of those fundamental operations of figuration. Anyone who's ever tried to rhyme has experienced that.
Excellent post. Thanks. Perhaps later Wittgenstein would have provided a tick of approval for the notion that poetry makes language palpable, reveals it as a thing in itself, draws upon a numinous intensity. He came to the view that language could not define itself except by practice, just as a game of chess is not made of the rules of the game. But is only chess when it is being played. So language is most revealed as the mechanism and stuff of thinking by poetry, where the game is often played against itself. Poems communicate by the very mechanism of revealing language to us. Exposing in the communication what we take for granted and forget. Revealing the rules of sense making by making meaning out of the mere sound of words.
Thank you Thomas. I have plenty to say about that as well. Perhaps I'll get to it in a post soon
I was hoping you might say that. 🙂
I am only just warming up to poetry now (in my mid-30s) and found this intriguing. I’m sure it will impact my experience with poetry in the future and for that, I’m grateful.
Thank you Tara. Really enjoyed your piece as well.
An unusually thoughtful piece on poetry, Robert- thank you. Perhaps I would have liked to hear a bit more about the conscious practice of poetry (rhetoric, to the ancients), but I enjoyed this. Thank you.
Thank you Freeman. I think there's something to be said about Wittgenstein's view of language and poetry, as you've described it. Poetry does make games out of those fundamental operations of figuration. Anyone who's ever tried to rhyme has experienced that.
Excellent post. Thanks. Perhaps later Wittgenstein would have provided a tick of approval for the notion that poetry makes language palpable, reveals it as a thing in itself, draws upon a numinous intensity. He came to the view that language could not define itself except by practice, just as a game of chess is not made of the rules of the game. But is only chess when it is being played. So language is most revealed as the mechanism and stuff of thinking by poetry, where the game is often played against itself. Poems communicate by the very mechanism of revealing language to us. Exposing in the communication what we take for granted and forget. Revealing the rules of sense making by making meaning out of the mere sound of words.