Philsophical Poetry

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Philsophical Poetry

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1ZealousDefender
Mai 30, 2007, 8:49 am

I was wondering if any one else mixed philosophy with poetry. It seems to provoke more thought in the creation process and when you read them as well. I post one to show you what I mean.

Paradox of Life

Life is filled with infinite possibilities
And only one paradoxical certainty
Each and every step and breath
May be your last before death
So for everything you have, be grateful
Even if you are not of the faithful
Be not a foe, but instead a friend
For we all are equal in the end

2heinous-eli
Mai 30, 2007, 2:10 pm

I totally do that! *stars conversation so that she can find her philosophical poems*

3parodyofpoetry
Mai 31, 2007, 12:19 am

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4skiegazer3
Mai 31, 2007, 9:09 pm

My favorite kind of philosophical poetry doesn't get all abstract and existential in its language, but uses the poetic medium--with its concrete imagery, sensory details and the powerful potential of metaphor--to conceive of philosophical ideas in new ways and explore them creatively instead of rationally (otherwise, why not just write an essay? ;)... I think Jorie Graham, Wallace Stevens and Jorge Luis Borges write excellent philosophical poetry of this type, and Wendell Berry does it, too, though sometimes I think with him it's more accidental. :)

Here are some poems like the ones I mean:

Walking on the River Ice

A man could be a god
if the ice wouldn't melt
and he could stand the cold.

- Wendell Berry

Life is Motion

In Oklahoma,
Bonnie and Josie,
Dressed in calico,
Danced around a stump.
They cried,
"Ohoyaho,
Ohoo"...
Celebrating the marriage
Of flesh and air.

- Wallace Stevens

The Wind Shifts

This is how the wind shifts:
Like the thoughts of an old human,
Who still thinks eagerly
And despairingly.
The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
Th wind shifts like this:
Like humans approaching proudly,
Like humans approaching angrily.
This is how the wind shifts:
Like a human, heavy and heavy,
Who does not care.

- Wallace Stevens

Adam Is Your Ashes

The sword will die just like the ripening cluster.
The glass is no more fragile than the rock.
All things are their own prophecy of dust.
Iron is rust. The voice, already an echo.
Adam, the youthful father, is your ashes.
The final garden will also be the first.
The nightingale and Pindar both are voices.
The dawn is a reflection of the sunset.
The Mycenaean, his burial mask of gold.
The highest wall, the humiliated ruin.
Urquiza, he whom daggers left behind.
The face that looks upon itself in the mirror
Is not the face of yesterday. The night
Has spent it. Delicate time has molded us.

What joy to be the invulnerable water
That ran assuredly through the parable
Of Heraclitus, or the intricate fire,
But now, on this long day that doesn't end,
I feel irrevocable and alone.

- Jorge Luis Borges

Remorse

I have committed the worst sin of all
That a man can commit. I have not been
Happy. Let the glaciers of oblivion
Drag me and mercilessly let me fall.
My parents bred and bore me for a higher
Faith in the human game of nights and days;
For earth, for air, for water, and for fire.
I let them down. I wasn't happy. My ways
Have not fulfilled their youthful hope. I gave
My mind to the symmetric stubbornness
Of art, and all its webs of pettiness.
They willed me bravery. I wasn't brave.
It never leaves my side, since I began:
This shadow of having been a brooding man.

- Jorge Luis Borges

5kierkegaardfish Premier message
Juil 27, 2007, 2:52 pm

I, too, am a sucker for the concrete philosophical, but I've always felt Wallace Stevens and Wendell Berry to be way to abstract (and over-rated). But you're on the money with Jorge Luis Borges. I think Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop are the only two Americans to have written poetry worth reading 500 years from now, precisely because of their more down-to-earth visceral-contemplativeness, which itself may be the very core of the sublime that makes a work a classic.

6bobmcconnaughey Premier message
Nov 26, 2007, 9:56 pm

early and late..
john dunne ---
a.r. ammons.

7bobmcconnaughey
Nov 26, 2007, 10:07 pm

also..Laura Fargas, who probably does science/poetry better than anyone.
--------
Among Our Great Ceremonies

A serious love touches the universe,
the two and one of its contributing to the sum of what's real.
Not that planets or even hydrogen atoms
begin falling toward you, yet something intensifies
where you are. The different light
shed by double stars. No consensus why they form,
nor have they all dim or dazzle, perishing.

8VanishedOne
Nov 27, 2007, 9:51 am

Nobody's mentioned the Greats? Parmenides, Lucretius, Nietzsche (occasionally): they all wrote poetry. The later Martin Heidegger was quite obsessed with poetry, especially Holderlin's.

9jburlinson
Nov 27, 2007, 9:50 pm

A philosopher can also be the subject of a good poem. (Actually, anything can.)

A Supple Wreath of Myrtle

Poor Nietzsche in Turin, eating sausage his mother
Mails to him from Basel. A rented room,
A small square window framing August clouds
Above the mountain. Brooding on the form
Of things: the dangling spur
Of an Alpine columbine, winter-tortured trunks
Of cedar in the summer sun, the warp in the aspen’s trunk
Where it torqued up through the snowpack.

“Every where the wasteland grows; woe
To him whose wasteland is within.”

Dying of syphilis. Trimming a luxuriant mustache.
In love with the opera of Bizet.

-- Robert Hass

10carusmm
Mai 19, 2016, 12:31 pm

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