In an essay on “The Government of the Tongue,” the late Seamus Heaney drew on the incident of the woman caught in adultery to explain the purpose of poetry:
“The drawing of those characters [by Jesus] is like poetry, a break with the usual life but not an absconding from it. Poetry, like the writing, is arbitrary . . . . it does not propose to be instrumental or effective. Instead, in the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.”
