Stirred by the emotional keys, later one of those thoughts occurred to me, the kind of thing we don't like to admit:
that our frenetic debates about poetics have missed something essential, which is that good poetry is emotionally expressive & expansive, in a way that touches the crowd, touches Everyperson, and that this elusive something is not measurable in terms of a political or aesthetic "position" nor by the minutiae of stylistic dissection. Thus the successful poets for the most part are elusive, evasive, noncommittal, &/or terse about "poetics", since it's a matter of an imponderable faculty outside the poet's control.
Mandelstam actually wrote several poems which address this conundrum of the "dream beyond reason" from various angles. From "Octets" (Moscow, 1934):
And Schubert on the water, and Mozart in the uproar of the birds,
and Goethe whistling on the winding path,
and Hamlet, thinking with fearful steps,
all felt the crowd's pulse and believed the crowd.
Perhaps my whisper was already borne before my lips,
the leaves whirled round in treelessness
and those to whom we dedicate our life's experience
before experience acquired their traits.
(trans. by David McDuff). this poem something like a Zen koan, to me anyway.
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