Poetry is "literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm". Through poetry, the different shades of humanity can be displayed through rhythm and language. Human imagination becomes art through poetry. Lines in a poem can define an entire imagination or headline a philosophical outlook. Through poetry, the beauty and potential of a language can be on display.
The creativity of humanity, how big can be an abstraction of small, and small living in its bigness, is what poetry can make possible. As an art form, it enters the poet's interior together with the reader and exits to the exterior according to what the reader understood from the echoes interior to the chambers whence the poet is. If it is strings that the poet makes sounds with, the reader will rhythm along; if it beats, the ears will drum along, and if it is cymbals, the melody will entangle the beauty of the language. In this vortex of beauty, style, art, and wordsmithing, the science of creating out of sense, something where nothing could be everything about anything, is a reality only nature can either dispute or flow along with.
Because the scientific imagination is fed by creative and timely questions, it will always need the nourishment of the discontinuous and leaps in thinking that receive their impulse from some other source than the worthy process of logical deduction. The imagination of science is responsible for all human innovation. The separateness of elements defines the limitations of science in nature, yet the collaborative bonding of the same elements describes science's limitlessness. At full expression, science is poetry in a different dimension. The origin of ideas is always poetic. Metaphors create curiosity in those committed to the definition of fiction as the science of a future not yet arrived at.
Seeing the moon and stars started on the religious side of the human mind. A god-form was seen in the cosmos. Until the quest to want to see how each might look like, the explosion of scientific curiosity would not have gotten to levels where satellite technology and collaboration define the smart realm of humanity. Humanity started to believe 'what the eye can see, the mind will be first to arrive sooner than the body can. Seeing the moon increased the curiosity to land. Poetic at first but actually scientific at the end.
Science, defined as "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment", is an outcome of curiosity. "Science generates solutions for everyday life and helps us answer the universe's great mysteries". If science is rational and poetry is creative, creativity undergirds imagination, and evidence-based imagination leads to scientific innovation, then creativity and imagination in poetry make science a form of poetry. "To write effective fiction, disseminate theological interpretation or…establish new science, [one needs] the ability to convince". This is true of the depth of sound poetry. The imaginative insight of humanity has propelled the innovative prowess of the human mind in the same way hypothesis as the primary illumination of poetry is to humanity.
Because poetry takes experience as its characters in the story told, its connectedness with reality packaged in tweets and nuggets of wisdom becomes the science of what has been, what is, and what may be. Just by saying things fall apart, Yeats spoke of his time in a way that made him timeless and thus defining contexts; we will all agree that when the centre does not or cannot hold, indeed, things will fall apart.
Similarly, when a poet says our fearful journey has begun, humanity can only imagine what has already started and is scary. When science manifests vision through invention, poetry manifests vision in the imagination that would paint in the virtual what science can engineer would translate to tangibles.
The poetic side of science generates questions, and the scientific side of poetry defines the interpretations. The abstract in science is poetic of science. Without imagination, there can never be science and poetry. In fact, the dynamic and creative interaction between ideas and their notation is necessary for the process of (thinking) science. Reason and emotion undergird science and poetry; it is scientific to be poetic as long as that poetry interacts with outcomes that define poetry. It is also poetic to be scientific. As one poet wrote;
What do I know that must be known?
What is it that is known for its sake?
Who knows it and why is it known?
Is it because I don’t know?
My knowledge does have an edge
The pledge to increase it is known
The path to acknowledgement will never be known
Because I don’t know
The great knower is alive in me
My ignorance chokes him
Rebellious as he is, he remains suppressed
Why he is locked; is it because I don’t know
Knowledge revolutions unfold in front of me
Struggles to participate converge on my eye-step
My capacity is wretched by my resistance to fit in
Is it because I also don’t know?
My identity is defined outside me
My world is a growing stranger
The content of my being is no longer my knowledge
Am I copyrighted or is it because I don’t know?
Patents and intellectual properties dominate my space
My thoughts, human as they are having limits
Knowledge that I naturally have is owned outside me
Prospects of recouping it diminish by day;
Is it because I don’t know
Do I know what I don’t know?
Even if I did, it will be because I don’t know
My quest to know will therefore always be because
I have never known; I am patented, copyrighted and trademarked
Therefore: I am because I do not know.
On the other hand, Albert Einstein, the human epitome of science, submits, "imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world". In fact, he believed "creativity is intelligence having fun...(and) imagination will take you everywhere". Because in poetry, imagination and creativity are King and Queen, "the true sign of (human) intelligence (cannot) be knowledge but imagination".
From science, Einstein concludes that 'imagination is the preview of life's coming attractions'. As humans, we are enough of poets to draw freely from our imaginations. The gift of fantasy in all of us is indeed what makes reality a persistent illusion only our inability to stop questioning can deal with. If experience is the ultimate source of knowledge, its expression as poetry defines science. As an art form, poetry's role is to assist humanity in seeing the world more clearly, yet through imagination. Equally, science is also, and always, in pursuit of how we should better understand our natural world. It follows then that the poetics of science are, in essence, the science of its poetics.
🤷🏿♂️Have a poetic weekend, as the science of rest questions why we really need a weekend. Amen and CUT!!!
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