>Therefore poetry itself coincides with the ability to utter, shape and
conceive languages as systems (of signs and symbols). Meaning (and I do
believe this): every single human being makes poetry while speaking (in fact
the creation of metaphors is a main device for all languages and is an
ability of all minds)
Although the argument dates back at least to Shelley's "Defense of Poesy",
with its claim that metaphor-making speech is original speech, this also
reminds me somewhat of Raymond Williams' contention that cultural creativity
is intrinsic to human cognition and perception in general, and therefore not
the preserve of the "creative artist": we are all - men, women, bricks -
"men of genius" in this sense. This isn't an empty egalitarian sentiment,
but a (possibly factually true; at least testable, debateable)statement
about the kind of thing that human minds are up to when they attempt to make
sense of their surrounding reality. The odd thing is that it does
nevertheless get elided with an empty egalitarian sentiment that wants to
disallow any specialised sense of "creative" (and is in fact opposed to
specialisation in general - see Williams on, for instance, "culture" and
"education"). It is one thing to observe that creative artists are human
beings exercising a human faculty, and another to suppose that all possible
exercises of this faculty are equivalent: one might equally well argue that
because not only Olympic pole-vaulters but in fact all human beings
metabolically transform sugar into kinetic energy, we are all Olympic
pole-vaulters.
Dom
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