Poetry is an attempt to convey a reality that the poet has in some way experienced by attempting to capture its totality through metaphor. In such an endeavor, metaphorical language demonstrates superiority over mere descriptive language by incorporating both meaning and ambiguity (allowing for the poet to communicate the perceived and the intuited, the “seen” and “unseen” of reality). Novalis said, "Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason." The holistic experience of reality that metaphor engenders gives a poem its special texture, sometimes referred to as “mood,” that unique combination of sign and feeling. But feeling in this case refers to more than what is ordinarily understood as “feelings”; it is a kind of intuitional intersubjectivity and remains on the boundary of the expressed and the inexpressible by its very nature. That is why a poem will be understood in a number of different ways, depending on the mindset of the reader. The poet and the reader will inevitably have distinct experiences of the poem as well. But this does not mean that either experience is invalid. This “tension between congruence and incongruence” (Paul Ricoeur, The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling) is at the heart of metaphor, as it is at the heart of our conscious perception of totality. All art entails perceptual distortion by both artist and aesthete. But the metaphor, by its allusiveness and ambiguity, goes beyond this distortion to create in the reader a combination of experience and insight. All this has been expressed better and more clearly by others, but it is very much at the heart of my interest in poetry.
