"If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets"

Poetry has long been celebrated for its ability to transcend the ordinary and explore realms of imagination, emotion, and insight unavailable to mundane reality. Peter Davison’s assertion evokes the essential nature of poetic creation, positing that embracing realism in the strictest, literal sense would undermine the poetic vision. Poets, by their very calling, are tasked not with holding up a mirror to the world’s exact surface details, but with refracting reality through their unique perspectives, emotions, and metaphors.

To suggest that poets should confine themselves solely to what is literal, factual, or possible is to strip poetry of its transformative power. Much of what compels readers to return to verse is not the representation of everyday facts but the ability to see beneath and beyond them: the metaphorical resonance, the leap of imagination, the creative juxtaposition that makes familiar experiences appear new. Even so-called “realist” poets, who ground their work in tangible details or daily existence, often reach into the realms of the subjective, the imagined, or the surreal to express truths not easily captured by direct reportage.

The poet’s realism is more deeply rooted in an emotional or intuitive truth than literal accuracy. Through poetic devices, metaphor, symbolism, irony, allusion, a poet can enhance, distort, or even fabricate reality to better communicate the essence of an experience. By being “unrealistic” in the everyday sense, a poem may paradoxically illuminate reality with greater force and clarity. Poetry delights in ambiguity, surprise, and paradox; it reframes what we take for granted and invests the world with meaning that surpasses the material facts.

If all poets adhered to mere realism, poetry would lose its mystery, its ability to astonish and reveal. Instead, by resisting the constraints of the ordinary and embracing imaginative leaps, poets fulfill their ancient purpose as visionaries, capable of seeing and saying what the rest of us may feel but cannot always articulate.