Huge subject, obviously. But I've been thinking about it and wonder what others think.
I'll give you my take--as of today, at 10 a.m. Tomorrow, I'd no doubt choose something else to say about it.
Both philosophy and poetry aim for--or should aim for--obedience to truth. Only the terms they use are different: philosophy uses abstract language and reason, usually, whereas poetry for the most part uses imagination and figurative language. The philosopher aims to state truth apart from the stamp of his or her personality, the poet's truth has personality stamped into the language itself.
Real philosophy doesn't seek truth as theoretical and abstract--that's for professional academicians, not philosophers--but truth as direct and actual. "Truth as such," as they say.
Both poetry and philosophy aim at truth as a destination still unknown.
My own favorite poets, Dante and Yeats, are explicitly philosophical, but I doubt there is such a thing as a poem without some philosophy in it.
Here's something that Wallace Stevens says on the subject. I don't really agree with it completely but it might be food for thought:
The truth that we experience when we are in agreement with reality is the truth of fact. In consequence, when men, baffled by philosophic truth, turn to poetic truth, they return to their starting point, they return to fact, not, it ought to be clear, to bare fact (or call it absolute fact), but to fact possibly beyond their perception in the first instance and outside the range of their sensibility. What we have called elevation and elation on the part of the poet, which he communicates to the reader, may not be so much elevation as an incandescence of the intelligence and so more than ever a triumph over the incredible.--from "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet," in The Necessary Angel
The part I don't agree with is that this has to do with poetry only, not philosophy too.
[This message has been edited by Andrew Frisardi (edited August 28, 2008).]
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