One of the great unresolved psychological enigmas of the modern western world is the question of what or who has persuaded us to accept as virtually axiomatic a self-view and a world-view that demand we reject out of hand the wisdom and vision of our major philosophers and poets in order to imprison our thought and our very selves in the materialist, mechanical and dogmatic torture-chamber devised by purely quantitative and third-rate scientific minds.

Poetry and Poets in a Time of Crisis

“For a long time now, it has been clear to many of us that we are coming to a turning point, if we have not already arrived. We do not yet know whether this election presents a crisis, is the result of one, or is its harbinger. No one does. A destabilized future yawns before us, as a great, worrisome vacuum, into which all our most terrifying visions can easily rush. We might have thought we had some idea about the shape of the future, its challenges and structures, but it seems we do not. Maybe we did not all along.

We only know that the immediate signs are bad. Deep, potentially irresolvable fissures in our democracy have revealed themselves, along with an epidemic of rage, as well as hopelessness. The results of this election were, for at least half the country and much of the rest of the world, a massive shock. Yet even had the results been different, we would still have been in a time of crisis. All the local and global problems were already there, and remain.”

Of all the arts the living of a life is perhaps the greatest; to live every moment of life with the same imaginative commitment as the poet brings to a special field.

An atheist,an agnostic and a Christian were  looking for  Coffee Shop with some vacant  seats so they could discuss politics.The Christian offered to say a prayer.When  she did there was a clap of thunder and a voice called,
With all the  horror  in  the Middle East, there’s no-one here to answer your prayer at the moment.Please try again  when  Palestine is sorted.
So she replied,How about Syria?
Immediately she was struck by lightning and burned to a cinder
The atheist said to the agnostic, she’d better have a Catholic funeral
No,said the agnostic, better have a  Jewish one!For He is a jealous G-d.If he exists.
What would convince you?
If she came back to life
Lo, the Christian reappeared and said
I don’t believe  that!

The French poet Paul Valéry claimed that a poem is never finished, only abandoned.

“In 1892, while visiting relatives in Genoa, Valéry underwent a stark personal transformation. During a violent thunderstorm, he determined that he must free himself “at no matter what cost, from those falsehoods: literature and sentiment.” He devoted the next twenty years to studying mathematics, philosophy, and language. From 1892 until 1912, he wrote no poetry. He did begin, however, to keep his ideas and notes in a series of journals, which were published in twenty-nine volumes in 1945. He also wrote essays and the book La Soirée avec M. Teste(The Evening with Monsieur Teste, 1896).”

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/everything-you-always-wanted-know-about-poetry

Quote:

Let me put it another way. The same sensibility that kicks poems around until they stand up like man and mean also flattens butterflies under glass and mounts animal heads on den walls. I am not sentimentalizing. I am not being the dreamy, wishy-washy thinker that poets are expected to be. When wildness is once and for all nailed, it becomes an ornament with trophy status. When all the mystery is crushed out of a poem, when its wings are pinned forever, when it no longer makes weird noises in the night, when it has grown harmless in the collection book of the school text, the poem will have attained the state of perfect meaning which is death. It becomes another prize in a landscape of stuffed birds. The saddest part of this education, for students and teachers alike, is that it’s much easier to trap a stuffed bird than to skin your knees chasing a live one. We train ourselves by this method of “analysis” to seek out examples of poetry that, because of their museum-piece status, are safe stuffed owls. This accounts for the preponderance of so much bad poetry even in anthologies that seem to be searching for something so much better, collections like Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle and Some Haystacks Don’t Even Have Any Needle. Most books of this kind display the same old trophies, leaking sawdust, gussied up with a veneer of contemporary typefaces and flashy layout.

Other poets seem to exist completely in their own spiritual interiors. The world “out there” pales in comparison to their inner lives, their thoughts and feelings. Trees and people seem to exist only as comments on what is taking place inside them. We can call the first group “extroverts,” the second “introverts,” if we wish. Whatever the poet’s attitude toward himself and the world may be, there is a continual struggle within him to be true to his own vision. Teachers and students should be aware of it. To seize her vision in language as accurately as she can, the poet takes chances, stabs in the dark of the world and the self, both of which are finally unknowable. Teachers and students should likewise be aware of this chance-taking so essential to the making of any art. The French poet Paul Valéry claimed that a poem is never finished, only abandoned. The poet, then, can never be positive he has got it down “right” for all time. In this light, how much more careful should those who study poetry be in fixing “final” interpretations to poems. In fact, the virtue of a great poem is that it can be interpreted inexhaustibly, from generation to generation, century to century, and even from culture to culture. No one has stopped writing about the Odyssey; the last word on Hamlet has yet to be said. The poem reads us as much as we read the poem.