Education Quote by Huston Smith

Poetry gets cast as ornament or escape, but Huston Smith yanks it back into the job description of reality. Calling it a "special use of language that opens onto the real" isn’t a Hallmark defense of verse; it’s a theological claim about perception. For Smith, ordinary speech often functions like a bureaucratic interface: useful, denotative, and numb. Poetry, by contrast, is language pushed past utility until it can register what analytic prose tends to flatten - awe, grief, moral complexity, the felt texture of existence. The line "opens onto" matters: truth isn’t manufactured by the poet so much as disclosed, like a door swung onto a landscape you were walking past.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to modern credentialing. We trust experts because they can quantify, cite, and standardize. Smith’s counter-tradition argues that the deepest forms of knowing are not merely informational but formative: they change the knower. That’s why he invokes the Celtic tradition’s radical criterion for teachers. A teacher, in that frame, isn’t just a transmitter of skills; they are an interpreter of meaning, accountable to the whole human. Poetry becomes a moral technology, training attention, sharpening honesty, resisting the euphemisms that power loves.

Contextually, Smith spent a lifetime translating religious worlds for secular readers, insisting that modernity’s greatest error is mistaking the measurable for the real. This quote is his shorthand manifesto: if you want truth, don’t only ask for data. Ask for language brave enough to tell it.