Throughout the ages, contemplators of great poetic geniuses and their creations have distinguished between craft and art, form and content.
          Craft is the skilled use of language devices that create form, the completed poem, which articulates content. Art is exquisite craft creating heightened form articulating content of maximum depth and breadth.
          High art, the province of true poetic genius, imparts the presence of transcendence. Transcendence is not something otherworldly; it is the intense apprehension — via eloquent form and elegant content — of an essential dimension of reality available to all humans but rarely conceived, or at least rarely articulated, by more than a few — a dimension that registers so persuasively within, it convinces us it is essential to our ultimate survival — the very be-ing of our deepest self, or soul. This persuasive register is the poem’s feeling — emotional, intellectual, sensual, aesthetic, ethical, and other subtle aspects we have not yet named.
          Having entered the mystical realm of presence, one stands face-to-face with meaning, which becomes one’s experience, and, if received deeply enough, an aspect of one’s personal truth. Has anyone who has encountered great poetry not felt the sweltering chill of that presence? — and not lamented that paradise lost? (Remember those exciting good old days as an undergrad when things were still “heavy”?)
          Presence is just that: being acutely present in this life in all its available dimensions, including the dimension of metaphor embedded in the poetry — Word, Logos — of existence. It is obeying the desire not only to interpret, but to actively participate in the resonating conceit with an act of meaningful creation. Pun intended: By conceit I mean extended metaphor, and the perceived attitude of anyone presuming to create.
          All great poetry starts here, with the cocky, yet humble, will to create that perfects craft and art at the moment it transcends them. Great poetry is self-transcending. But self-transcending within the context of literature evolving within the context of a massive transcending Creation awesome beyond comprehension. Created in the image of the Creator by whatever name, the poet senses that he has not only the ability, but the responsibility to create.
          And that responsibility is not a burden. On the contrary. The sensuous pleasure of creation brings the joy of insight, the peace of self-awareness, the excitement of having brought a work of art to life. What is life-force but that edge where the not-yet-manifest comes into being? Yet those uncomfortable with vulnerability shun that edge and squelch their creativity; the culturally secular deny the sacredness of the process of creation.
          Great poetry pushes us beyond the status quo, making both past and future present, while pre-sent-ing truth that never ceases being meaningful. Being including having become and becoming, like the universe resonating outward from its Big Bang.
          Paradoxically, we create with given materials, sometimes very given, as in the case of, say, an Elizabethan sonnet. It could be argued that it takes more creativity to make something unique out of tight form, with so much already given, than to raise something up from the blank page — not that any page is ever truly blank. Good formal poetry could be viewed as the most rebellious type of poetry in that it must assert the greatest will to create in spite of, or even in resistance to, the greatest restrictions, and must then seduce the will of the form to collude with the will of the poem.
          Part of making anything new involves excavating what has been, whether it is memories, meanings of words, unconscious observations, or the history of literary craft and art programmed in our brain cells. Meaning requires active interpretation — re-vision —, and self-transcendence requires faith in transcendence; without this faith, no one can be open to the experience of meaning in any work of art. Pushing beyond is to some extent pushing back into, like a new image or symbol refers to something we already know. Creation is never making something from nothing. It is adding another line to life’s vast network of connections.
          The transcendent dimension is dramatically embodied in Aristotle’s hero, who, he asserts in his Poetics, is ourselves but greater than ourselves; the hero is the particular example representing the universal ideal, a human being of super-human power capable of tremendous good and profound evil — at bottom, all great plots (and even a short lyric has a mini-plot) concern the shadow’s struggle toward or away from consciousness. We are each of us a latent hero the way an acorn is not yet an oak.
          Through his representations, the poetic genius inspires the hero, meaning he awakens the feeling of that transcendent dimension embodied within us; it is the “otherworldly” aspect very much of this world, the awesome, terrifying spiritual presence that permeates what Longinus called the “grand and harmonious structure” of the material universe, including ourselves. It is the awareness of our discrete being among other beings within the infinite, eternal realm of Being itself. Even The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock or a play like Waiting For Godot demonstrates presence ironically by making us feel the anxiety and fear of its absence. No wonder poets are obsessed with death, and with love, the perpetuation in every sense of life-force.
          The deep feeling tapped by the poetic genius is not the superficial, sentimental tear-jerk of so much contemporary confessional poetry (and by confessional, I do not mean autobiographical). Great poetry reaches far beyond the “woe-is-me I had a bad childhood just ask my therapist” gushing. Its concerns ripple out beyond the personal soap opera, the political harangue, the nature poet’s backyard butterfly tacked to a corkboard.