Do Poets Have Any Insight

I Am Talking About Poetry. It's Like That Line From [john] Yeats: I Go Back To "where All The Ladders Start/ In The Foul Rag And Bone Shop Of The Heart."

Literature, The Study Of Literature In English In The 19th Century, Did Not Belong To Literary Studies, Which Had To Do With Greek, Latin, And Hebrew, But Instead With Elocution And Public Speaking. So When People Read Literature, It Was To Memorize And To Recite It.

After Pope, In The Beginning Of Romanticism, People Developed The Idea That Imagination Rather Than Reason Was A Special Form Of Knowledge And Its Best Expression Is Through Poetry. Therefore, Poetry Should Not Try To Do The Stuff That Mere Prose Does: Convey Information Or Make Arguments About Ideas.

Reading Is A Gymnasium For The Imagination Where People Can Work Out, Get Ready For The Shocks Of Existence. [...] For Me, The Intimate Teachers Have Not Only Taught Me How To Make Things, They Have Represented Some Qualities Of Mind And Mindfulness That I Would Like To Have.

It's The Same With This Idea Of A Literate Public, And Also Of A Democracy In Which People Have Access To And Really Read The Best Books. It Turns Out That Even When You Create This Kind Of Environment, Maybe Only 10 Percent Of The People Want To Read Those Books.