"Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet"
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Huston Smith treats poetry as a mode of knowing, not an ornament. To say it opens onto the real is to claim that certain uses of words do more than report; they disclose. Metaphor, rhythm, and image do not evade truth but make it present, allowing reality to be felt and grasped in the wholeness of experience. Where analytic language extracts propositions, poetic speech invites participation. It is a doorway rather than a map.
Calling truth telling the poet’s business resists the modern suspicion that poetry is merely subjective. The poet is tasked with fidelity to what is, including what is most difficult to name: grief, wonder, injustice, the sacred. This is not truth as bare fact but as revelation, an un-concealing. That charge aligns the poet with the seer and the prophet, the one who sees through distortion and speaks with moral risk.
Smith’s nod to the Celtic tradition grounds the claim in a culture that entrusted knowledge to bards and filid. In early Ireland and Wales, poets kept genealogies, laws, and histories, trained students in bardic schools, and were believed to bless or expose rulers through praise and satire. Verse served memory and judgment; the cadence of a line could carry a code of conduct or a binding truth. The requirement that a teacher be a poet was not aesthetic snobbery but recognition that education aims at more than data transfer. To teach is to form perception, to refine attention, to give words that can bear the weight of reality.
The argument challenges a narrow idea of truth as only empirical or technical. It suggests that a culture that sidelines poetry also risks diminishing its access to the real. If language can either dull or awaken, then the poet’s craft becomes a civic and spiritual necessity, and education, at its best, must be an apprenticeship in saying what is so.
Calling truth telling the poet’s business resists the modern suspicion that poetry is merely subjective. The poet is tasked with fidelity to what is, including what is most difficult to name: grief, wonder, injustice, the sacred. This is not truth as bare fact but as revelation, an un-concealing. That charge aligns the poet with the seer and the prophet, the one who sees through distortion and speaks with moral risk.
Smith’s nod to the Celtic tradition grounds the claim in a culture that entrusted knowledge to bards and filid. In early Ireland and Wales, poets kept genealogies, laws, and histories, trained students in bardic schools, and were believed to bless or expose rulers through praise and satire. Verse served memory and judgment; the cadence of a line could carry a code of conduct or a binding truth. The requirement that a teacher be a poet was not aesthetic snobbery but recognition that education aims at more than data transfer. To teach is to form perception, to refine attention, to give words that can bear the weight of reality.
The argument challenges a narrow idea of truth as only empirical or technical. It suggests that a culture that sidelines poetry also risks diminishing its access to the real. If language can either dull or awaken, then the poet’s craft becomes a civic and spiritual necessity, and education, at its best, must be an apprenticeship in saying what is so.
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| Topic | Poetry |
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