I suppose my comments about poetry & Being sound rather anachronistic or simplistic, compared with something like Paul Fry's theory of poetry's "ostensive" substance (see his Defense of Poetry). But Fry's theory could be seen as a contrasting counterpart to my position, since the "ostensive" also presents a kind of equilibrium or order, which gives poetry a unique and anomalous position in the larger realm of discourse. I posted more about Paul Fry etc. here.

I'm a partisan of the old idea that Being is present to us most clearly in the fact of personhood and consciousness; that individual persons also reflect or stand in for some deeper more mysterious reality of personhood and consciousness; & that this fact of subjective consciousness does not rule out an additional mystery, that all things & beings in the universe also share with us in that representation; that everything takes part, through the slow rolling of time, in some manifold musical embodiment, unfolding or event... & the more I think about this, the more I'm drawn to a sort of franciscan attitude toward nature & experience...

Keats' "negative capability" formulation reminds me that too often we look at the poets of past eras through abstract lenses we learned in school ("the Romantics", "the Victorians"). We forget that poets of every era share more, as poets, than what divides them by way of historical distinctions & differences. Thus Keats here is speaking as a craftsperson, of his experience with making - the experience of living with uncertainties & unknowingness, for the sake of the distinct & anomalous shaping-work of the poem. This is the poet's experience in every era.

What I'm getting back to, I think, is what seems to me an undergirding set of principles, of you will, which distinguishes the poet's motive & purpose in the world from that of any other "worker-in-discourse" : the principle, basically, that in poetry, language, consciousness and personhood are fused together and alive - the poet stands for a humanized world, a civilization, resting in a kind of Bergsonian elan vital, rather than in some kind of cold amoral solitude, a dead universe...

Moreover, the fundamental law of civilization itself rests on this consciousness (ie. our personal attitude toward this "conscious reality", and consequently toward those who share it with us)...

Is this just old Romanticism? OK. It's Franciscanism too, maybe - something even older.