How Poetry Scratches our Spiritual Itch
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,
Nature I loved, and next to nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
— Walter Savage Landor, “On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday”
In The Age of Atheists, historian Peter Watson traces the history of the secular search for meaning and purpose, from Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God to the present day. One of the most interesting themes of the book is the importance of poetry, not just to writers, but to other artists, scientists, and philosophers as well.
Reflecting on his imminent death from pancreatic cancer, the American philosopher and atheist Richard Rorty recalled the lines above by Landor and the comfort they had given him, and also these verses from Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “Garden of Proserpine”:
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
But it is not just poetry’s power to give us solace in the face of death. Its value to secular thinkers goes much deeper and broader. Poetry transforms the mundane objects and events of life into something fleetingly sacred, essentially and irreducibly mysterious. In that sense, it mimics the oceanic feeling of religious experience.
When I was feeling my own ties to the faith of my parents ebbing away, I too found solace in poetry, especially the romantic poems of e.e. cummings. But the rational, scientific side of me still wanted to understand how poetry could perform this function. What makes poetry a good spiritual surrogate?
In Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Dan Sperber and Dierdre Wilson argue that normal communication differs from poetry in that the latter is often concerned, not with evoking a precise interpretation, but rather with creating a diffuse amplification of many related aspects of the background knowledge we bring to our reading. In their words, poetry “achieves most of its relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures.”
An implicature is a term of art in linguistics that refers to what is suggested by an utterance, though not strictly implied or entailed in the logician’s sense. Having grown up Catholic and attended mass every Sunday, it seems clear to me that there is a parallel between religious ceremony and the reading of poetry, in that both are capable of evoking a richly textured web of concepts, even as their precise meanings remain elusive. Religion often pretends that there is at least one person — God — to whom these meanings are clear, but as an atheist, my guess is that there is no essential mystery, only the reduced explanation and the unreduced experience. Like a joke that becomes unfunny in the explanation, it’s not that beauty and mystery can’t be fathomed; it’s just that sometimes we want to enjoy them for their own sake.