Life & Wisdom Quote by John Barton

Poetry gets demoted, in John Barton’s formulation, from decorative language to a method - not a mood, not a hobby, not a personality trait. Calling it “another form of inquiry” quietly raids the vocabulary of labs, fieldwork, and philosophy seminars, then smuggles it back into the arts. That’s the point: Barton isn’t begging for poetry to be respected as “beautiful.” He’s insisting it can be useful in the most serious sense - a way of knowing.

The phrase “nature of phenomena” matters because it refuses the easy, sentimental object. Phenomena are what appear: experiences, events, sensations, social facts. Poetry, Barton implies, isn’t tasked with explaining them away or pinning them down; it probes how they register, how they distort, how they recur. That’s a subtle defense against the common charge that poems are merely subjective. Inquiry can be subjective and still rigorous.

The clause “using with its own unique procedures and tools” is the strategic flex. Barton draws a boundary around poetic method: compression, metaphor, line breaks, rhythm, ambiguity, sonic patterning - techniques that don’t translate cleanly into prose without losing their investigative force. It’s also a warning to critics and institutions: don’t evaluate poetry by the standards of journalism, scholarship, or therapy. Poetry doesn’t fail when it won’t “clarify”; it’s often working precisely where clarity would be a lie.

Contextually, it reads like a late-20th/early-21st century rebuttal to STEM-flavored prestige culture: if knowledge is only what can be measured, we’re impoverishing the map of reality. Barton’s move is calmer than a manifesto, but it’s still a claim to epistemic territory.