Seers, Saints, Poets
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Our Town
15 min read
The article opens with and repeatedly references Thornton Wilder's play, using Emily's climactic speech as its central thematic framework. Understanding the play's structure, Wilder's metatheatrical techniques, and its reception would deepen appreciation of why this particular moment resonates so powerfully with questions about attentiveness and living fully.
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Denise Levertov
15 min read
The article directly quotes Levertov's view of the poet as priest and poem as temple. Her life as a poet who explored spirituality and attention in her work provides concrete context for the article's central themes about poetry as spiritual practice.
Toward the end of the play Our Town, Emily, in tears after having been given a chance to relive some moments of a regular day in her life, turns to the Stage Manager and asks, “Does anyone ever realize life while they live—every, every minute?” The Stage Manager’s first answer is no, but then he reconsiders: “Saints and poets maybe . . . they do some.”
What do you think? Do poets actually live differently from other people? If so, how?
Poets are sometimes described as seers. I think that when people call poets seers, they are doing so because of some experience they’ve had with poetry as readers that makes them suspect that poets, in order to create the words that affect the readers so deeply, must be seeing (and maybe living) differently than other people do.
As for the line in Our Town, I’m not sure which comes first for Wilder. Is he asserting that engagement in the work of writing poetry leads to intense, attentive living, or that “poet” is a good title for someone who has managed to live this way? Technically, the definition of poet is simply “a person who writes poetry.” Of course, anyone can and probably should write poetry. But few would argue that Dr. Seuss’s poetry and Edgar A. Guest’s poetry and the “Footprints in the Sand” poem and Mary Oliver’s poetry and that of Wallace Stevens and Rae Armantrout all arise from the same kind of person, or from the same kind of attention.
I think that when Wilder postulates that poets—or any artists--might experience life more intently, he is referring only to those poets (and painters, and potters, and musicians) who have managed to create something that enables readers to feel their own experience more deeply. Perhaps also he is speaking from his own experience of creating art because he knows that in order for him to create art that moves others, he must engage in a certain kind of attentiveness.
What, then, is that attentiveness, and when in a writer’s process does it take place? Is it in the living, or in the work—or both?
There is a sort of cultural awe, sometimes, about this mysterious, god-struck poet-figure who sees more clearly and is more inspired than regular mortals (inspiration: being breathed into by God). That divine lightning strike is what calls the poet, and it is then her job
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