On poetry and opposites

Brian Blanchfield takes what has sometimes been seen as a problem, that poetry is mostly only read by other poets, and points out that this suggests the act of reading poetry turns readers into poets, which could be something to celebrate.  Brian Blanchfield is a poet himself but such a brilliant essayist he has turned me into an essay reader, though I am not yet quite turned into an essay writer the way Jan Morris has turned me into a (sometimes) thought diarist.  If poets have had to be reassured about the tendency for poetry readers to become poets, philosophers, Agnes Callard reveals, have always set out “to infect others with our need to find answers,” describing the philosopher “as an especially needy kind of truth-seeker.  Like vampires, zombies and werewolves, we are creatives who need company, and will do whatever it takes to create it.”   I seem to be very susceptible to the infection and here is another thought posting that starts with a question Agnes Callard raises, this time in an article “Should we cancel Aristotle?”  The answer is no but not because his views on slavery or women’s rights are defensible, and not because they can be overlooked as tangential to his thinking, but because his culture is so alien to our own we can argue against his views with no fear of them being politically dangerous.  But this is how we should approach all views, if we could approach all views philosophically, as if every idea could be examined without fear of the political dangers not of implementing it but of even considering it.  We have a cancel culture, Agnes Callard argues, because we’ve got caught up in a messaging culture, in which “every speech act is classified as friend or foe, in which literal content can barely be communicated, and in which very little faith exists as to the rational faculties of those being spoken to.”  So she calls for “the freedom to speak literally,” which I suppose is also a request to be listened to literally.  I was so interested, and quite persuaded, by this framing of the issue in terms of a contrast between messaging and speaking literally, it made me wonder where poetry fits in.  The literal is much more ordinarily thought of as the opposite of the figurative, the space where poetry finds its resonance.  But if poetry is the opposite of the literal, it is the opposite of messaging also.  I have now reached the beginning of the thought I was going to post, but only by already pruning off a few offshoots, and the thought itself is clearly going to want to branch out into quite a tangle of thinking so instead I will just stop and admire the surprising situation of poetry that Agnes Callard has made apparent, as it sits as the opposite both to the literal, and to messaging, at one and the same time. ​