Much has been written about poetry and its importance for us humans.
I want to share, on this page, a single page from a book/memoir of reflections on poetry: the author is Christian Wiman, the book titled, He Held Radical Light, 2018. The book’s subtitle is The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art.
Wiman is referring to a passage he has just quoted, by Susan Howe in her book Frolic Architecture.
I read this passage over a over. (It is itself darkly transparent.) It still seems to me a fresh and useful description of what poetry (“sound-colored secrets”) can do and why we read and need it (“proof against our fear of emptiness”). It is also a beautiful—and, I think, accurate—description of what an experience of God can be and do in our lives. Instead of the paved roadway being our search for aesthetic truth, though—of what value would that be, finally? can there even be aesthetic truth without some other, more ultimate truth as precedent?—I would say that the road is our search for spiritual truth. This is why a poet’s technical decisions are moral decisions, why matters of form and sound have existential meaning and consequences. It’s also why poetry is so important in the world, even if few people read it. Its truth is irreducible, inexhaustible, atomic; its existence as natural and necessary as a stand of old-growth trees so far in the Arctic that only an oil company would ever see it; and just like those threatened trees, its reality ramifies into the lives of people for whom it remains utterly irrelevant and/or obscure. The same may be said for other arcane ways of facing God. “Sorrows have been passed,” as Howe concludes in that passage above, “and unknown continents approached.”