Why poetry? Who cares, right?

I read the poems in the New Yorker.  Sometimes, I even understand them!  And every once in a while, I head to my favorite poetry website and read poems there.

What is so great about poetry?

The prosaic person that I have been, and I am, have no competence to address this question and, hence, will excerpt from an essay by Cynthia Ozick:

Poetry itself, because it is written, because it is spoken, because it creates a world in the mind, tends to the scriptural—"the heterocosm," Harold Bloom calls it in an essay on Yeats, "or the poem as an alternative world to that of nature." But poetry also aspirates the given and actual cosmos, and rounds the mundane earth—mundane yet not profane. Here is Charles Wright, fashioning a scripture of plum blossoms:

Belief in transcendence,
belief in something beyond belief,
Is what the blossoms solidify
In their fall through the two worlds—
The imaging of the invisible, the slow dream of metaphor,

Sanction our going up and our going down, our days

And the lives we enfold inside them,
our yes and yes.

I like that description of the heterocosm.

Ozick adds:

What is strange about poetry is what is most manifest: not so much the unpredictable surge of its music as the words of which it is made. Everyone uses words; from minute to minute, from a million larynxes, a deluge of words falls on the air. Every word has its own history, and is a magnet for cultural accretion. A poet has the same access to the language-pool as a tailor, an archaeologist, or a felon. How strange that, scooping up words from the selfsame pool as everyone else, a poet will reconfigure, startle, and restart those words! How strange that what we call the norms of life—sociology, anthropology, the common sense of common observations of nature: call it whatever you like—how strange that all these habits and pursuits to which poetry is said to be irrelevant are precisely what poetry has the magisterial will and the intimate attentiveness to decode!

Indeed!

And to think that understanding the cartoon below will require at least a vague familiarity with this!

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
 So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

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