What Makes Poetry Possible

In his stimulating Clark Lectures (recently published as Grace and Necessity ), Rowan Williams suggests, following David Jones, that there are certain ontological conditions for the possibility of poetry: “the ontology, if we can use that forbidding word here, of a universe that is inextricably both material and significative, where things matter intensely, but matter in ways that breach boundaries and carry significance beyond what they tangible are. Words are material communication; things are material words. And the distinctive fact about humanity is this double business . . . of attention to the creaturely and immediate, and involvement, known or unknown, in the making of meaning or the uncovering of connection.”