'Knowledge, Real Lasting Felt Knowledge'

A reader asks why I so often write about poetry but am not a poet myself. “Have you ever written poems?” he asks. “Do you write them secretly and keep them to yourself?” I wrote a lot of it around age sixteen, like many delusional, love-struck teenagers. I’m glad I disposed of that stuff a lifetime ago. I was no Rimbaud. I had a brief relapse about twenty years ago under the cover of “light verse.” It too was embarrassing junk. Like most poets, I have no gift for it. I have always assumed a capacity for writing good verse is almost as rare as first-class musical composition and performance, mathematics and chess. 

So, why do I so often write about it? Because I admire and learn from language used well, with wit and precision, whether poetry or prose. It gives me pleasure. When I read and then write about, say, John Dryden or J.V. Cunningham, it deepens my enjoyment and, I hope, spurs others to share my pleasure. In his essay “Where Poems Come From,” a review of Stanley Burnshaw’s The Seamless Web (1970), Guy Davenport writes:

 

“It is worthwhile adding that the power of the poem to teach not only sensibilities and the subtle movements of the spirit but knowledge, real lasting felt knowledge, is going mostly unnoticed among our scholars. The body of knowledge locked into and releasable from poetry can replace practically any university in the Republic. First things first, then: the primal importance of a poem is what it can add to the individual mind.”

 

[Davenport’s essay is collected in The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981).]