NYT Blog: Philosophy And The Poetic Imagination

I want to quote the entire article from the New York Times blog, but I fear that I may break some law or ethics. So I must simply recommend strongly that you go to http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/philosophy-and-the-poetic-imagination/

for thought-provoking words on Philosophy And The Poetic Imagination.

Here's the final paragraph and a bit:

In short, a poem — and artistic language more generally — is open to whatever we find in it.  Whenever we notice that an unexpected formal feature amplifies our experience of a poem in a novel way, we add to our understanding.  All the same, we can still say what makes these interpretive efforts poetic.  They do not concern the ordinary significance of form in language.  When we approach language prosaically, our focus is on arbitrary conventions that link words to things in the world and to the contents of thought.  These links allow us to raise questions about what’s true, and to coordinate our investigations to find answers.  But poetry exists because we are just as interested in discovering ourselves, and one another, in what we say.  Poetry evokes a special kind of thinking — where we interpret ordinary links between language and world and mind as a kind of diagram of the possibilities of experience.

New technologies can only add to these possibilities.