Bringing the Poetic Experience into the School

A contemplation for Summer

Last week, I broached the subject of poetic knowledge through the Trojan Horse of videogames. This week, I’d like to talk about poetic knowledge in the place where it should live and move and have its being: the school.

I say “should” because, well, I was a teacher for a decade before I even encountered the concept of poetic knowledge, let alone considered how to incorporate it into my classroom. The poetic mode of knowledge is already present in much of what younger students do in a classical school, but its uses ought to extend far beyond the lower grades, and, anecdotally anyway, it seems few know this. As I said, I certainly didn’t. Let’s consult James S. Taylor’s Poetic Knowledge:

“First of all, poetic knowledge is not necessarily a knowledge of poetry but rather a poetic (a sensory-emotional) experience with reality.”

Very well. This is most easily observed in the difference between knowledge of facts and knowledge of experience. Poetic knowledge is the latter. So why call it “poetic?”

“Among the philosophers and poets of ancient, classical, and medieval times, [the poetic] way of knowing was virtually a given as part of the human being’s ability to know reality. […] By the twentieth century, the idea of objective reality- and man’s various responses to it -[had] been eclipsed, for the most part, by subjectivism and a less certain, more lonely and mechanistic model of the human being and the universe.
As a result, the tradition of poetic knowledge is now all but forgotten, usually dismissed as “romantic,” and otherwise misunderstood if considered at all.” -Taylor, Poetic Knowledge, pg. 5

The poetic mode of knowledge is an idea inherited from the ancient Greeks, who held that learning was the result of desiring to imitate what surrounds us, a natural impulse “to reflect what is already there.” It is this impulse that we call poetic. Further, the impulse is inextricably bound to our five senses, because is through them that we experience the world as it is. Our senses allow us to form relationships with the aspects of the world that we experience, and that knowledge permeates the school through microcosmos and paideia.

This is why it is necessary to contextualize poetic knowledge through the lens of what’s been lost and what has changed in the time since the poetic mode of learning was common. Taylor points to Rene Descartes’ philosophy as the point where things began to change. The key figures of the Enlightenment held that the mind is the supreme judge of reality, and their influence was enough to erode the foundations of the ancient, classical, and medieval worlds. I don’t want to get into a huge discursion about the Enlightenment and its legacy, save to say that there’s a sad irony at its heart. To wit, the phrase “my truth” didn’t exist pre-Enlightenment, and yet, people’s understanding of things in that time was grounded in their individual sensory-poetic experience. Much to think about there. We might get into that another time.