Feeling poetic

I’m no poet, but sometimes I feel poetic. What’s that feel like? It feels like, “I wish I were a poet so I translate that to language.”

But there are a couple of other things going on too. One is a desire for explanation. When the spring breeze comes through the window of my library and billows the curtains, or I see the breath of God make the trees outside dance, I wonder about wind. I think briefly about oxygen, CO2, water vapor, nitrogen, whatever; but when I reach for an explanation I don’t reach for science. I wish I were a poet. I feel poetic.

Poetry as a mode of explanation: That’s an ancient and perhaps medieval instinct. Lucretius chose poetry as the vehicle for exploring the nature of things because it sweetened the hard doctrines of his Epicurean atomism. But he also thought poetry was a mode of explanation.

Why? I suspect this is related to the second thing that’s going on when I feel poetic: It’s a desire to render something that eludes my grasp. In some ways, this second feature defies the first. How can poetic inspiration be both a desire for explanation and a desire to describe what one cannot (perhaps ever) explain? I don’t think the two motives are contradictory; they only seem so because “explanation” has been monopolized by science. Someone has recently written a book advocating an “epistemology of ignorance.” That’s the epistemology of poetry.

This has a final corollary. If poetry aims at explanation of the unexplainable, then it drifts, in the nature of the case, from the poet. That is, the poet can’t finally and fully say what he’s about. I recently tried to write a little poem after an evening walk through a park. Only after working on it did I realize that there was a theme – an autumnal/winter theme of bare branches, sunset, frozen pond. I didn’t set out to write an autumnal poem. I tried to capture what was there, and it turned out autumnally.

And this corollary has a corollary: Poetry exceeds the poet because the world does. We try to render the world in words, but the words always capture more than we realize because there is meaning embedded out there, in the things we’re trying to translate into verse. I was moved by the scene in the park, but I didn’t quite know why. I still don’t entirely, but I’ve got a better idea now than before I attempted the poem. The poem didn’t record a prior experience; it recorded the world and revealed the experience in the process.