Carolina QuotesThe discipline of poetry may be expected first to teach the evocative power of words, to introduce the student, if we may so put it, to the mighty power of symbolism, and then to show him that there are ways of feeling about things which are not provincial either in space or time.
Richard M. Weaver Carolinian
Source
“The Power of the Word,” pp. 52-53.
- work
- Language is Sermonic (1970)
- year
- 1970
- locator
- pp. 52-53
Cite this record
“The discipline of poetry may be expected first to teach the …” Richard M. Weaver. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-067E68EEBC. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/067e68eebc
More from Richard M. Weaver
From the viewpoint of my general purpose, I had come to believe that one way to achieve the education which leads to understanding and compassion is to take some period of the past and to immerse oneself in it so thoroughly that one could think its thoughts and speak its language. The object would be to take this chapter of vanished experience and learn to know it in three if not four dimensions. That would mean coming to understand why certain actions which in the light of retrospect appear madly irrational appeared at that time the indisputable mandate of reason; why things which had been created with pain and care were cast quickly on the gaming table of war; why men who had sat in the senate chamber and debated with syllogism and enthymeme stepped out of it to buckle on the sword against one another. Almost any book of history will give you the form of such a time, but what will give you the pressure of it? That is what I particularly wished to discover.
It is likely … that human society cannot exist without some source of sacredness. Those states which have sought openly to remove it have tended in the end to assume divinity themselves.
Beneath the surface of repartee and mock seriousness, Plato’s Phaedrus is asking whether we ought to prefer a neuter form of speech to the kind which is ever getting us aroused over things and provoking an expense of spirit.