One reason why poetry
is
important for finding
out about the world is because
in poetry a set of relationships get mapped onto a level of diversity in
us that we don’t
ordinarily have access to. We bring it out in poetry. We can give to
each other in poetry
the access to a set of relationships in the other person and in the
world that we’re not
usually conscious of in ourselves. So we need poetry as knowledge about
the world and
about ourselves, because of this mapping from complexity to complexity.
Gregory Bateson, Our Own Metaphor
Gregory Bateson, Our Own Metaphor