Poetry

“[Poetry] is the language whose first halting utterances are our efforts to describe our experience by getting images of it from other realms of experience… It is the language, skipping or solemn, that elevates our experience by imposing a form upon it, not arbitrarily, but because it suspects that the truest way of speaking of that experience is formally. It is the language that, in effect, sets the table for lunch, that is, that disposes and arrays the common stuff of experience so that it is ritually transfigured from mere function into an instance of glory.

For it is the language that takes a serious view of experience. It is not satisfied with the idea of mere random tumble. It is not mere random tumble, it insists. There is something here. There is something to be said. There is something, oddly, to be elicited from this tumble. Take it. Grasp it. Handle it. Try one thing and another. Try to shape it. Impose some form on it, you will wonder whether that form was imposed by you or whether it emerged from the thing itself.

This is the business of the poets. They are the burdened and happy spirits who can do this—this that we all try to do. Burdened because they know that the most important thing is the most daunting thing—to seek and find and utter that significance that emerges from the union of form and content; happy because from time to time they succeed.”
~Thomas Howard