I think it’s best to be honest, right here in the first sentence, before you read any further you should know that I don’t have much of a background in philosophy. There, now that that’s out of the way I don’t have try and pretend.
The way I understand it philosophy is a lifestyle. You live philosophy. You can have a philosophy on how to live your life such as “I think therefore I am” or a philosophy on an abstract concept like truth such as James: “that ideas become true just in so far as they help us to get into a satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience.”
While poets can metaphorically live and breathe poetry, they don’t generally live by the rules of poetry. Philosophy has always, to me, seemed like a search for an answer, for truth. Poetry does not work in definite answers. There are too many gaps in language, and it doesn’t try to answer. Poets use philosophy. One such poet is Wallace Stevens.
Stevens employs philosophy in his poetry because he lives it. For example this passage from the second canto of “Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction”:
“And yet so poisonous
Are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to
The truth itself”
Stevens is discussing the fatality of searching for truth that will never be had, but doesn’t provide an answer.
It is possible that we have merely made an arbitrary distinction in the two fields. That poet and philosopher are the same. It could be the way we read poetry as opposed to philosophy. It could be that when I think “philosopher” society has told me to think of crazy overgrown beards, and when I think “poet” I think of Emily Dickinson. But as of now I see philosophy as a way of life, and poetry as a means to express life.
Lovely, Leah. This made me "think of (one of) James' definitions of philosophy: The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos."
ReplyDelete