Poetry and reality …

… The Poet as Namer. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

What I am suggesting now is that it is the poet who most effectively names things in this way, who most powerfully arrests our attention from the seemingly chaotic tenor of experience and begins to display to us the determinate nature of the reality encompassing us. This is one of the key respects in which poetic language differs from non-poetic language. We customarily think of the language of poetry as being unique on account of its expressiveness, its sweetness, or even its loftiness of tone and diction. These are clearly proper grounds of distinction. But what I am emphasizing now is that poetic language is unique also on account of its precision, its capacity to display things in their true light, and, in this way, to prepare the furniture of the world for the mind’s reception.