[New-Poetry] What has poetry taught you?

[Bob Grumman]

David Graham wrote:
> Dennis O'Driscoll:    What has poetry taught you?
>
> Seamus Heaney:    That there's such a thing as truth and it can be 
> told -- slant; that subjectivity is not to be theorised away and is 
> worth defending; that poetry itself has virtue, in the first sense of 
> possessing a quality of moral excellence and in the sense also of 
> possessing inherent strength of reason by its sheer made-upness, its 
> integratis, consonatia and claritas.
>
> from *Stepping Stones:  Interviews With Seamus Heaney*, by Dennis 
> O'Driscoll.  Farrar, Straus, 2008.
>
My immediate, doctrinaire response to the question of what poetry's 
taught me is, "Science teaches; poetry has better things to do."  (But I 
don't really believe poetry has better things to do.  "Science teaches; 
poetry has other equally valuable things to do" doesn't have much whoop 
to it, though.

--Bob G.
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