fredx
06-10-03, 05:49 PM
It is my humble opinion that a poet is a philosopher that doesn't think. He acts in words. Philosophy is the art of what Hannah Arendt has called the "professional thinker". Poetry is anti-thought because it usually only expresses what is there, while philosophy is usually concerned with essences, or what is there but is not seen.
Poetry is a simple art or a peasant's art, which is not to say that it does not take skill, but that it is like a craft, which is always the domain of the craftsmen, or skilled working peasant. It is a mirror image while "true" philosophy always finds itself in reflection.
Poetry is a peasant's art, from Blake to Ginsberg to the pop singer Jewel's latest bookform rantings. This does not mean that these people are necessarily poor but they embody a certain mentality that is inducive to the expression of feeling that is necessary to make good poetry. To write good poetry you must be exposed to a certain level of suffering. That is why rich people hardly ever write poetry or if they do they write rather bad poetry. They don't suffer the same as those that are exposed to how harsh life can be when survival is always on the line. The money forms a shield against pain, no matter how much they might protest that they know pain, there is no pain worse than poverty. All poets write from the perspective of a kind of poverty.
Perhaps it can be said that philosophers have to be poor as well, and at least those that came after Plato and Aristotle were. Since them, the greatest men have been of relative poverty, i.e. Spinoza, Augustine, Sartre, Camus, Vico, Nietzsche, etc. Of course I don't mean to only consider academic philosophers, I mean anyone that would say that they practice philosophy. That philosophy and poetry both find their spring from lack or desire is well documented in Hannah Arendt's dissertation "Love and St. Augustine", where her thesis is that love is wellspring of all of man's products, even philosophy and poetry, and love is in a sense desire. On page 22 of "Love and St. Augustine", Arendt says, "In this sense caritas (which is a type of desire) indicates not God's "circulating" presence within us, but the grace bestowed by the Creator upon his creature." The grace in terms of this article are the arts of philosophy and poetry.
To return, the heading of this post is the "Philosophy of Poetry" and that is really what I had hoped to speak about. I would like to conclude with this: Poetry is looking at the world through a window with sections, whereas with philosophy we seek to feel the world with our brain.
Poetry is a simple art or a peasant's art, which is not to say that it does not take skill, but that it is like a craft, which is always the domain of the craftsmen, or skilled working peasant. It is a mirror image while "true" philosophy always finds itself in reflection.
Poetry is a peasant's art, from Blake to Ginsberg to the pop singer Jewel's latest bookform rantings. This does not mean that these people are necessarily poor but they embody a certain mentality that is inducive to the expression of feeling that is necessary to make good poetry. To write good poetry you must be exposed to a certain level of suffering. That is why rich people hardly ever write poetry or if they do they write rather bad poetry. They don't suffer the same as those that are exposed to how harsh life can be when survival is always on the line. The money forms a shield against pain, no matter how much they might protest that they know pain, there is no pain worse than poverty. All poets write from the perspective of a kind of poverty.
Perhaps it can be said that philosophers have to be poor as well, and at least those that came after Plato and Aristotle were. Since them, the greatest men have been of relative poverty, i.e. Spinoza, Augustine, Sartre, Camus, Vico, Nietzsche, etc. Of course I don't mean to only consider academic philosophers, I mean anyone that would say that they practice philosophy. That philosophy and poetry both find their spring from lack or desire is well documented in Hannah Arendt's dissertation "Love and St. Augustine", where her thesis is that love is wellspring of all of man's products, even philosophy and poetry, and love is in a sense desire. On page 22 of "Love and St. Augustine", Arendt says, "In this sense caritas (which is a type of desire) indicates not God's "circulating" presence within us, but the grace bestowed by the Creator upon his creature." The grace in terms of this article are the arts of philosophy and poetry.
To return, the heading of this post is the "Philosophy of Poetry" and that is really what I had hoped to speak about. I would like to conclude with this: Poetry is looking at the world through a window with sections, whereas with philosophy we seek to feel the world with our brain.