Poetry and Biography

[Philosophy Now]

Roger Caldwell on meaning and innocence.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/8/Poetry_and_Biography

[marjoram_blues]

Interesting view of a poet who gave up poetry for prose due to the trauma of being accused by police of the having carried out his writings in real life.

He returned to it later. And his perspective about imagination, biography and poetry is this:

All of us – even, and perhaps especially, the supposedly unimaginative – live much of our lives in imagination, and imagination deals with that part of our lives, which is much the largest part, which we do not live out as facts of biography. Obviously so, for otherwise it would not need to be imagined. The imagination is required to fill out our lives, and its satisfactions are as fully real – empirically so – as anything which happens in the outer life into which it spills. In writing I explore a life I have not lived: the poetry is the presence of that absence. Thus, when the police come to my door again, I have an answer ready, though no confidence in its power to convince. It is this: “whatever happens in my poems has not happened to me. I am merely the one who puts his name beneath. The other, who did in the poems what I did not do, is permanently abroad.”

© R. Caldwell 1993

The poetry is the presence of the absence of an aspect of life not lived.