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Are God and the gods still there? How poetry matters
Are God and the gods still there How poetry matters Author:John Newton What is the future for poetry? Can it again be the great sublime and revelatory force that it has sometimes been in the past? And can it thereby matter again not just to people in the small and isolated poetry 'scenes' and the university literature departments but to something more like our whole community? John Newton is strongly convinced that... more » poetry can be this force and matter to very many more people than it now does. He argues both that it has a power and value so special as to be religious in their essential character (and potentially greater now than those possessed by formal 'religion') and that, especially when some new poetry that those present poetry 'scenes' are showing little or no interest in gets better known, that special power and value will be more and more widely felt and appreciated. The argument is addressed to everybody, as in its nature it must be, not to 'specialists' qua 'specialists', and is always lively - sometimes, where it needs to be, hard-hitting.« less