Poetry Is The Evidence of Life

It’s the Spice.

“Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.”

Hannah Arendt

A German Jewish philosopher, certainly not without controversy. A product of Germany during WWII striving to understand evil. I haven’t thought about her in over 40 years. I first studied her in a university class.  A CBC Radio show on the drive home brought her back.  I am not sure if I really understand her work but, I heard the above quote and it really stuck.

It’s interesting to look at great thinkers and philosophers positions on  “poetry”

“Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.”

  – Plato

“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.”

– Aristotle

Or to look at an existential poet from Germany.

“For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke

Or to look at the poet “lover” from my teenage years. He was never far from my side.

From Spice Box of Earth (still kept in my bedside table)

Summer Haiku

Silence

and a deeper silence

when the crickets

hesitate

I can’t imagine my life without  the ability to experience emotion through poetry, to feel my experiences through poetry and to find the truth in history through poetry.