Poetry: the music of language

"Poetry is the way in which language can subvert language. It disconcerts the reader in certain ways, makes connections the reader is not used to in order to liberate hidden levels of meaning in words. But when those words are stuck together in the way that, for example, a user manual for some technological device sticks them together, there is no hidden anything. In the business of living, as we use language, it develops layers of meaning, and those can only be accessed through things like poetry, myth, metaphor, humor (which is particularly important), and narrative." - Iain McGilchrist 

One inevitably acts, designs, and speaks in such a way that is figurative, that points beyond any explicitly instrumental or utilitarian ends. The only question is whether we realize this or not. That's the ethos of ritual, ornament, and poetry. This is why Xunzi said all is ritual, why Alexander said all is ornament, and why still others have said all is poetry. Furthermore, poetic verse is under no obligation to comply with any preconceptions for how language should work. There's a reason why McGilchrist created a playlist of 365 poems (and not 365 pieces of music, however lovely that might've been.) As he noted above, poetry flaunts its subversive approach to the conventions of language, for as Heidegger counseled, thinking "must think against itself." This notion of poetry as both subversive and transparent gets to the essence of what language is and always will be. McGilchrist describes poetry at length in The Master and His Emissary

“Poetry cannot be just any arrangement of words, but one in which each word is taken up into the new whole and made to live again in a new way, carrying us back to the world of experience, to life... words are used so as to activate a broad net of connotations, which though present to us, remains implicit, so that the meanings are appreciated as a whole, at once, to the whole of our being, conscious and unconscious, rather than being subject to the isolating effects of sequential, narrow-beam attention. ...Language, a principally left-hemisphere function, tends, as Nietzsche said, to ‘make the uncommon common’: the general currency of vocabulary returns the vibrant multiplicity of experience to the same few, worn coins. Poetry, however, by its exploitation of non-literal language and connotation, makes use of the right hemisphere’s faculty for metaphor, nuance and a broad, complex field of association to reverse this tendency. ‘Poetry’, in Shelley’s famous formulation, ‘lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar … It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.”

It has been said that music, like poetry, is intrinsically sad, and a survey of music from many parts of the world would bear that out – not, of course, that there is no joyful music, but that even such music often appears to be joy torn from the teeth of sadness, a sort of holiday of the minor key. It is what we would expect in view of the emotional timbre of the right hemisphere... The pre-Socratic philosopher Gorgias wrote that ‘awe [phrike] and tearful pity and mournful desire enter those who listen to poetry’, and at this time poetry and song were one... In fact early poetry was sung: so the evolution of literary skill progresses, if that is the correct word, from right-hemisphere music (words that are sung), to right-hemisphere language (the metaphorical language of poetry), to left-hemisphere language (the referential language of prose). ...I know of no better exposition than Scheler’s perception of the nature of poetry:

"For this reason poets, and all makers of language having the ‘god-given power to tell of what they suffer’ [Goethe, Marienbader Elegie], fulfil a far higher function than that of giving noble and beautiful expression to their experiences and thereby making them recognisable to the reader, by reference to his own past experience of this kind. For by creating new forms of expression, the poets soar above the prevailing network of ideas in which our experience is confined, as it were, by ordinary language; they enable the rest of us to see, for the first time, in our own experience, something which may answer to these new and richer forms of expression, and by so doing they actually extend the scope of our possible self-awareness. They effect a real enlargement of the kingdom of the mind and make new discoveries, as it were, within that kingdom. It is they who open up new branches and channels in our apprehension of the stream and thereby show us for the first time what we are experiencing. That is indeed the mission of all true art: not to reproduce what is already given (which would be superfluous), nor to create something in the pure play of subjective fancy (which can only be transitory and must necessarily be a matter of complete indifference to other people), but to press forward into the whole of the external world and the soul, to see and communicate those objective realities within it which rule and convention have hitherto concealed."

In The Matter with Things, McGilchrist described his “lifelong celebration of art, and poetry, but of music above all.” Here he echoes the sentiment of Josef Pieper, who wrote that music is "one of the most amazing and mysterious phenomena of all the world’s miranda, the things that make us wonder." McGilchrist again: "There is a continuity in form and function [between human music and] early poetry in preliterate societies, which was usually accompanied by music, was socially performative, and helped establish and expand common mythologies and narratives, confirming meaning in the deep structures of life, and consolidating the common purpose of the group: mythos at work.” There's a translucent boundary located somewhere between a melody without words and words without a melody. From music came poetry, and from there, language. “The most expressive aspects of language still are its ‘musical’ qualities (the movement of the verse, its ictus, metre and rhyme), pitch variations, intonation, rhythm, speed, volume and flow; and that it approximated the rather more abstract and symbolic nature of language as we now know it by degrees, beginning in the right hemisphere, as language still does in children, and gradually crossing to the left hemisphere, leaving music behind in the regions of the right hemisphere that are homologous to the ‘language areas’ of the left.”

Or rather than one being the ancestor of the other, perhaps they share a common ancestor. From The Master and His Emissary: "There are those who hold that music and language developed independently but alongside one another, out of a common ancestor, which has been dubbed 'musilanguage' ...there is no culture anywhere in the world that does not have music, and in which people do not join together to sing or dance." Neither is there any culture without an oral tradition. Creating a beautiful new song is a real talent, and a skill not equally shared by all. But only after listening to a song briefly most people are able to easily recall it. Perhaps this asymmetric facility for remembering music, though not composing it, extends to and mingles with poetry as well. And instead of endeavoring to create new poems, we would do better to try to understand the context of oral traditions, which musilanguage evolved to support. We are bearers of poetic traditions. If this is true then we would benefit from practicing that tradition and devoting time to study and recitation. 

Poetry is now more self-reflective than it perhaps once was, but it does retain the aspects of connoting a deeper meaning, and connection between the polarities of a linguistic map and a melodic terrain. This is akin to a three part progression of the mountains and waters verses. Now however the transition is from original musilanguage, to music and language, to neo-musilanguage (aka poetry), no longer simply an early developmental stage, but as a higher level re-integration following development of the capacities latent within it. Many youth seek solace in song lyrics, and some in poetry as well. The poetry of children can be profound because they are by nature nearer to an unfiltered experience of reality. McGilchrist again: 

"Children up to the age of about 11 or 12 will often write rather wonderful poetry, but once they get into their teens the poetry tends to deteriorate because, in a way, it becomes more self-conscious and they think "I'm writing poetry now". One way of looking at it is that children are pragmatists, so they're encountering reality in a very empirical way and responding to it without too much overthinking. Gradually the more theoretically minded part of the brain, which is the left hemisphere, starts to dominate and restrict one's spontaneous, open receptivity to the nature of reality, which the right hemisphere is good at, by interfering with its own theoretical mapping or diagramming of the world." 

Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language

“The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities’, wrote Ortega y Gasset: ‘its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.” Charles Darwin wrote in an autobiography for his family, later published after his death, “If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week." I hope to take his lesson to heart. There is a clip of unseen footage from "The Divided Brain" documentary titled "On epiphanies and the patterns of Western culture." Here McGilchrist recounts an experience, one that is also referenced in The Matter With Things. It's one that resonates strongly with me, as I felt the same when I heard Patti Smith recite The Tyger. (In fact, listening to her is the reason I wrote this article, and why I now believe poetry is so important.) McGilchrist again:

"One eureka moment for me was in my relationship with Wordsworth... Wordsworth became for me a complete genius, and to this day I consider he is the, absolutely the greatest poet in the English language. It does depend on getting away from many of the anthologized pieces actually, but there we go. It happened one day while I was in Oxford and I was talking to a critic called Rachel Trickett, who was supposed to be supervising some work I was doing on the Augustans (i.e. the 18th century writers who came before) and we got on the topic of the caesura in Goldsmith (the caesura is the break in the line of the verse). And this session together, which was supposed to last only an hour, had already gone on for two hours because we were so much enjoying talking about these things. And I realized it was almost time for me to go and have dinner. And she said "I just want to read you the first 110 lines of Tintern Abbey" which is one of the very famous poems of Wordsworth. And I thought, and I almost said, "Rachel please don't do that because I know this poem very well, some of it I know by heart. It's getting late." Anyway I didn't. And thank God I didn't, cause she read it, and there was a way in which she read it in which I thought "I have never heard this poem before. I haven't ever got near knowing this poem, until this moment." (She began to talk about it and pointed to his use of comparatives, his use of negatives to evoke something beyond, to evoke what we cannot actually pin down, and the movement of the verse, how it moved through certain phases, how it accelerated and then slowed down, very much sort of rallentando, and you felt as the words themselves implied that you were going into a sort of deeper almost trance-like, sleep-like state. It was astonishing. I mean people say they've had drug trips and so on. I don't need drug trips. I had Rachel Trickett reading the Tintern Abbey.) And I can remember going, after that, going back to college, walking down the Woodstock Road in Oxford, and my feet scarcely touched the ground. And, you know, there was a sort of 'golden glow'. It was, if you like, an epiphany for me."

At such times, it seems that ritual, ornament, and poetry come together, suffusing one another in one seamless experience. McGilchrist again: 

"There is a video clip of Judy Collins and Pete Seeger singing "Turn, Turn, Turn", which was Seeger's version of Ecclesiastes. It's the idea that there is a cycle to things, which sounds as though it might be a rather simple thing, but listen to it. Not only is the song very good, but watch Judy Collins' face while she's singing. It's absolutely a spiritual experience. You can see the soul of the woman singing."

But the power of poetry isn't restricted to evoking emotions. McGilchrist again, from The Matter with Things: 

“In the attempt to describe quantum reality, ordinary language simply breaks down. As Niels Bohr put it: ‘We must be clear that, when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.’ ...If reality is such that our knowledge is intrinsically, not accidentally, incomplete; if it is intrinsically, not accidentally, uncertain; if it is intrinsically inexpressible in everyday language, requiring exceptional, non-denotative, highly metaphoric, ‘poetic’ use of language to get beyond the limits of language [then] …talking about the constitution of the physical world must be poetic in some way. ...As Sam Matlack puts it: ‘And if poetry is necessary for talking about the foundations of physical reality, this should both elevate the importance of poetry and help to disabuse us of the idea that we can exclude the more personal, parochial, poetic forms of language and still truly apprehend reality.”

McGilchrist: "One of the wonderful things in reading literature is to see, time and again, how these great minds, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli, Bohr, Bohm, you name it. They all speak in the same sort of way that mystics do, which is to speak in terms of riddles, and paradoxes, and poetry. And they in turn were able to see that that wasn't a problem with religion, it was just that it was dealing with something that couldn't be put into everyday language, and neither could what they knew of the physics." 

McGilchrist: “What [Anglo-American-Analytic “Triple A”] philosophy is trying to do is get as far away from poetry as possible, because it sees ambiguity, connotation, multiple layers of meaning, things that refer to things obliquely and implicitly, as all confusion. [But] Wittgenstein says one should write philosophy as one writes poetry, Heidegger said that philosophy was like poetry (it went further into a certain kind of truth, but it used the methods of poetry), and A.N. Whitehead said that good philosophy is akin to poetry.”  

Describing the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, McGilchrist writes: 

“It makes us feel, as nothing else could do, the dangers of explicitness, and therefore the value of obliqueness: of myth, intuition, poetry, music, and all the other arts, true philosophy, true spiritual understanding, and every imaginative act whose aim is to offer a glimpse of the elusive nature of reality.” Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that: “the work of the painter, the poet or the musician, the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental, and the only kind really common to us all – knowledge of which scientific thought is merely the sharpened point: more penetrating because it has been honed on the stone of fact, but at the price of a loss of substance."

What is the substance thus lost? I think this is depth, the implicit, and the transcendent. And so we can best pass through the words to the hidden layers of meaning beneath and behind them when they are not so narrowly explicit and opaque that they prevent us from doing so. Today our world is awash in a sea of explicit representation. Digital media is everywhere. The hall of mirrors constricts us tighter, in both private and public life, and it's easy to lose sight of the fact that work isn't just about what "it's about" (what is written on the paper). If it's not about what it's about, then what is it about? Implicit qualities can only be gestured toward, suggested, and felt or experienced. There's a difference between reading a book about how to swim, and actually jumping in the water. The literal words are never the full meaning. As Bruce Lee once said, they are like "a finger pointing away to the moon. Don't concentrate on the finger, or you will miss all that heavenly glory." This may also be what Nansen was trying to get at when he said "If one of you can say a word, I will spare the cat." But today the implicit, the spirit behind the words that animates the voice, has been sacrificed on the altar of the explicit. And no longer do we sit by candlelight listening to a single story told or read by a single voice.

Look at the screenshot from Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language. Here is an unintentional "poem." And for me it also illustrates that language learning can, and maybe should be, poetic. We can write about resistance, but in a suggestive, oblique manner, and explore the paradox of how that which is incomplete may yet gesture toward wholeness. Some websites that teach foreign languages provide the weekly news using basic vocabulary, these could be lineated to yeild a more dramatic feel. There have also been dramatic readings of microblog entires (from Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky) for humorous effect. Generally, no one actually speaks like this, but liberation from rules can be very helpful at early stages in the process of language acquisition.

References: 

• Paul Keegan. The Penguin Book of English Verse (2005) "I've always kept poetry by my bed all my life. And when I've traveled I've got a very massive copy of The Penguin Book of English Verse, which has gone everywhere with me," McGilchrist said in a June 2021 interview.
• Philip Larkin. Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse (1973) "Surely one of the most rewarding anthologies ever compiled," (TMHE)
• Donald Keene. The Pleasures of Japanese Literature (1988) "Keene draws attention to the place of mist, haze, fog and moonlight in Japanese poetry" (TMHE)
• Robert Wicks. The idealization of contingency in traditional Japanese aesthetics (2005) "We read that traditional Japanese aesthetics is an aesthetics of imperfection, insufficiency, incompleteness, asymmetry, and irregularity, not to mention perishability, suggestiveness, and simplicity." (TMWT) These qualities imbue much of Japanese poetry as well. See also wabi-sabi.
• Henri Bergson. The Creative Mind (1946) "...this very modest share of intuition has become enlarged, that it has given birth to poetry, then to prose, and converted into instruments of art [...] All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they will never give the inner meaning of the original."
• Iain McGilchrist. Epistemology and Metaphysics (2023) “If you explain a joke it's no longer funny. If you explain a poem you're left with a handful of banalities.”  
• Iain McGilchrist. Dogma and the Brain (2014) “When I was a practicing psychiatrist, many of my most valued colleagues were therapists who worked with drama, art, sculpture, and music. They produced phenomenal results that weren't possible by using more verbal and rational techniques."