[New-Poetry] What is Poetry?

[TheOldMole]

It's the Negative Capability letter. To his brothers.

*several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what 
quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and 
which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, 
that is, /when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, 
doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason/-Coleridge, 
for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from 
the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content 
with half-knowledge. *

The thing is, poetry is kinda different from life. In life, we probably 
have to reach after fact and reason pretty early on. In poetry, we allow 
ourselves a little more time. We can be of three minds, like a tree in 
which there are three blackbirds.

I've asked this before, but since we're back to it again...what is Keats 
saying about Coleridge? The conventional wisdom seems to be that he's 
criticizing for a limitation -- I think he's praising him for a superior 
quality. I suppose that to try and answer this question might constitute 
an */irritable reaching after fact and reason/, *but what the hey.


Jeff Newberry wrote:
> It's funny that you mention Keats, Mole.  I've been reading through 
> his letters.  I'll try to track down the passage you reference.  I'm 
> pretty sure that I know what you're talking about.
>
> Jeff Newberry
>
> On 7/1/07, *TheOldMole* <Opus40-01 at opus40.org 
> <mailto:Opus40-01 at opus40.org>> wrote:
>
>     Keats kinda said the same thing.
>
>     Jeff Newberry wrote:
>     > " . . . one of poetry's chief aims is to illumine the walls of
>     > mystery, the inscrutable, the unsayable.  I think poetry ought to be
>     > taught not as an engine of meaning but as an opportunity to learn to
>     > live in doubt and uncertainty, as a means of claiming indeterminacy.
>     > Our species is deeply defined by its great surges of reason, but I
>     > think it high time we return to elemental awe and wonder."
>     >
>     > --Major Jackson, "Does Poetry Have a Social Function," Poetry,
>     January
>     > 2007
>     >
>     >
>     > Jeff Newberry
>     >
>     > --
>     >
>     > "THIS QUOTE CENSORED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY"
>     >
>     > http://museoffireblog.blogspot.com
>     >
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>     --
>     Tad Richards
>     http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
>     http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ <http://opusforty.blogspot.com/>
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> -- 
> "Memory believes before knowing remembers.  Believes longer than 
> recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."
> —William Faulkner, Light in August
>
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-- 
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/