"The profoundest gift of the spirit of poetry to a person’s
secret culture is the gift of peace.
Poetry can reconcile a man or a woman to the simplest and barest
situation. As long as the forlornest
patches of earth and sky are left to us to be enjoyed by the mind we can feel
ourselves into the mod of Achilles crying aloud to Thetis or of Prometheus
defying the wide heaven. Between the
shutters of the most sordid attic the Holy Grail itself can be seen, traversing
the sky, between chimney and chimney!
Where a few blades of grass can grow in the wretchedest yard, there are
immortal spirits of Dante’s limbo welcome their last proud initiate. Under a luminous poetic light that falls
where it wills all the simple recurrent details of our days gather an amplitude
and a mystic significance. Birth and
death, food and fire, sleep and waking, the motions of the winds, the cycles of
the stars, the budding and falling of the leaves, the ebbing and flowing of the
tides – all these things have, for thousands of years, created an accumulated tradition
of human feeling: and what culture appropriates from the art of poetry is the
power to realise this tradition, to realise it ever more reverently and ever
more obstinately."
(John Cowper Powys, The Meaning of Culture)
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