I congratulate John Higgins for his wide-ranging and yet acutely perceptive essay on the nature of poetry, agreeing with all that he has said, and grateful to him for showing me what I will now— though with trepidation—accept as the first poetry in Genesis, particularly those brilliant strands of thirteen words, deliberately left incomplete, or rather left open, to be completed by man’s own longing soul. I am reminded here of the contemptuous sneer placed on the lips of Henry Drummond, the Clarence Darrow character in the deeply dishonest film Inherit the Wind, as regards “the pleasant poetry of Genesis.” “Pleasant” is the last word I would use to describe the first three chapters of Genesis, those that have to do with the creation of the world and the fall of man. Soaring, mysterious, profound, disturbing, all-embracing, yes; pleasant, no. But “poetry” itself, on the lips of that lawyer defending the teaching of Darwinism and scoffing at Christians who held to their faith in the special creation of man, seems to have meant only what was pretty, soothing, of no peculiar value for knowledge. It was not science, but poetry—that is to say, only poetry.

Higgins shows that such an attitude toward poetry is itself unreal. It mistakes what poetry is and reduces reality to what can be measured; but both poetry and the real far exceed our attempts to trammel them up in a convenient cage of definition. Poetry, as he so shrewdly notes at the end of his essay, is not a mnemonic but a metaphysic. I might adjust the saying, and in a way that Higgins himself, I believe, would approve, since he captures what it means for poetry to enter our souls and plant its garden there. Poetry is mnemonic in the deepest sense precisely because it is metaphysic. It opens up to us realms of transcendent truth, not merely by speculation but by its music, its repetition, its self-similarity that unites the smallest of its parts with the greatest, its saying more in ten words than prattlers and politicians can say in ten thousand, and its not saying but suggesting, or its falling silent. For silence in poetry is like silence in music, not an absence but a presence, a well of being, a touch of the infinite. Wordsworth:

To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

And that is how his “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality” ends, on a note of joy mingled with fear and awe. To say any more would be to say less, or to unsay.

Yet there is one feature of poetry that Professor Higgins has not addressed, or only tangentially. I trust that here too we would find ourselves in agreement. For whatever I or anyone else says about poetry, we must necessarily leave much unsaid, lest we drown our own beloved music in the noise of words and the jitters of a spirit impatient with what must always be incomplete. Here I think of the words of Philip Sidney, writing in his “Apology for Poetry” against a sour sort of Puritan criticism that would see in poetry a threat to good morals and the inculcation of religious truth. Sidney has in mind what his beloved Aristotle had in mind when he wrote his Poetics, namely the creation of characters embodying virtues and vices in dramatic stories, whether or not the stories were meant specifically for the stage. Thus did Xenophon by his Cyropedia “imitate so excellently as to give us effigiem justi imperii, the portraiture of a just empire, under the name of Cyrus,” that he “made therein an absolute heroical poem,” even though it was not written in verse form. For, says Sidney, “it is not rhyming and versing that maketh the poet, no more than a long gown maketh an advocate, who though he pleaded in armor should be an advocate and no soldier. But it is that feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a poet by.”

I do not want to accuse Sidney of overstating the case, since his “Apology” goes on to treat of most of what we otherwise consider the distinguishing marks of poetry proper, and since he himself engaged in many bold experiments in meter and forms of verse. But the poesis he has in mind is fundamentally the telling of a story, and for someone of the Renaissance, a story implies the crafting of an intricate plot, with characters in action, the characters charged with moral import. Higgins has identified, I believe correctly, the first poetic verses in Scripture, but Sidney would suggest that the whole of Genesis is poetic, in that it presents to us, though not in fictional form, what he names as “prosopopoeia,” face-making, that is, the presentation of persons, inhabiting a world, and teaching us of good and evil. If we counter and say that that turns Pride and Prejudice into a poem, so that poetry properly would be left with no necessary features other than the narrowly linguistic or musical, Sidney himself might shrug and say that his Arcadia, all nine hundred pages of it, most of it in prose, is of course a poem, and then we might be compelled to draw a further distinction between what he is doing there and what Jane Austen did in Pride and Prejudice, so that we call the latter a novel, but the former, a vast poem that happens mostly to be written in prose.

Let us then pull back a little, and at least say that modern poets have done ill to cede the whole realm of narrative to novelists and writers of short stories. None of the greatest poets of our English heritage did so. To see narrative as at best tangential to poetry, or overlapping with it but rarely and fitfully, is, in our times, to reduce it to the expression of an individual’s feelings or, more banally, political convictions, with the expression either enhanced by or clotted up with linguistic trickery. Such was not Frost’s urgent and unresolved poem of marital unhappiness, “Home Burial.” Such was not Eliot’s deceptively prosy portrayal of one of the three wise men long after the fact, in “The Journey of the Magi.” Such was not Coleridge’s magnificent moral fable in the form of a ballad, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

Perhaps we can say, allowing that all that Professor Higgins has said is correct, that the dramatis personae, even if it is only the persona who speaks to us in the poem, are also or can also be essential elements, not accidental, to a poem’s mighty concentration of meaning or suggestion into the smallest space—to apply Donne’s description of the dwelling of the Word of God in the womb of Mary, “infinite riches in a little room.” Likewise with the dramatic motifs, the elements of plot, of symbol. The Gawain-poet describes his hero’s shield, both the outside that faces the world and helps define the hero in his presentation to others, and the inside which he himself faces: Gawain looks upon the portrait of Mary. The poet does not tell us everything we are to make of the shield. He cannot do it, even if he were so foolish as to try. For the outward device is the “endless knot,” five virtues each of which are expressed in five ways or by five means, and their implications for human life are open and various and full of agency and power. And the inward device, the portrait of Mary, is beyond our grasp. How can we possibly understand fully the power of her reply to the angel, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; be it done unto me according to thy word”? For at that moment the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

Shakespeare too knew that the most dramatic moments are those in which poetry, verging upon the fullness of silence, as of the Spirit of God brooding upon the waters, leads us by its music—whatever instruments it may employ in that music—into the precincts of the divine. I find myself at this point sensing that the more I say, the less I must mean. So I will conclude with a moment that I hope will embody, in dramatic form, all that both Professor Higgins and I have intended. It is from Shakespeare, and it comes from the climactic final scene of The Winter’s Tale. We are looking at a statue of Queen Hermione, who, by all accounts, died sixteen years before, exhausted from a recent childbirth, though the child, a baby girl, was cruelly taken away from her. Her heart was torn by her jealous husband and his public accusations, her head was covered with shame at having to defend her purity and faithfulness at trial, and then her spirit was crushed by the sudden news that her son whom everyone loves is dead. King Leontes of Sicily, who accused her and who has endured sixteen years of penance, is there to behold the statue. So is the daughter Perdita, whom Leontes intended to kill or at least leave to the elements in a far-off land. So is the man whom Leontes also accused, his boyhood friend King Polixenes of Bohemia and Polixenes’ son Florizel, who fell in love with Perdita in Bohemia, neither of them knowing her true identity. And the mistress of the ceremony is Paulina, faithful to her own mistress the queen and the spiritual counsel of the king ever since; the one person to whom he submits in penitential humility, even against the advice of his courtiers who beg him to marry again. The sculpture is in her home. It was carved, she says, at her request.

All the onlookers have been revealed to one another and reconciled when Paulina brings them to an inner room, for Leontes to see a statue of the good and holy wife he lost and Perdita to see the likeness of the mother she never knew. They are stunned by her beauty and by the artist’s skill, so divinely inspired as to carve Hermione not as she once was but as she would be after the passage of time. Then Paulina asks if she may use her own art, not the sculptor’s, to make the statue move. It is not a black art, she says. Rather, “It is required you do awake your faith.” That is the crucial word. Everyone in Shakespeare’s audience would have heard it in all its theological power. And Leontes, overcome with wonder, and longing with love for the wife he so foolishly lost, agrees. Now comes the speech at this dramatic moment which intimates in a few words all that I can say more explicitly but less truly about what poetry is and how it is man’s creative response to the supreme maker God:

Music, awake her; strike!
’Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach;
Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come,
I’ll fill your grave up; stir, nay, come away,
Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him
Dear life redeems you.
And Hermione stirs. She descends from the pedestal, and she speaks.

Anthony M. Esolen is an American scholar, author, translator, and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College, known for his sharp cultural commentary and literary work, including Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World, and the sacred poem The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord. He has translated major works like Dante’s Divine Comedy and writes widely on literature, culture, and faith. He also publishes a Substack called Word & Song, devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true through essays, poetry, hymn reflections, and cultural commentary.