Real Poetry

Sharon Goodier was a poet in Toronto.

Deahl presents a treatise on art, poetry and the Real. Reality is singular and absolute. Real poetry has stance (psycho-philosophical), intent (for each word), and content (feelings, statements, response). It rejects scientific analysis and extrahuman morality, rational thought with its emphasis on logic, and spontaneous thought which denies conscious intervention. Deahl accepts the laws and principles of the universe. He structures real poetry to illuminate the ground of being. Value inheres in the real. Art has value. Poetry is essential.

The essay focuses Deahl’s spiritual senses: the religious (albeit non-theist), the mental, the social, or political, and the aesthetic. It is a creditable attempt at analysis. Sometimes presumptuous, it frequently digresses to attacks on philosophies, countries and politicians. It rambles around in philosophies of science and history. “To replace bourgeois values, we will have to develop a society based on scientific observation and a realistic appreciation of the spiritual underpinning that grants existence its meaning.” The force behind the universe issues forth creation and destruction; therefore all is sacred. “Value inheres in the supernatural. The supernatural interpenetrates all being. All things have objective value by virtue of their relation to the supernatural.”

Although Deahl is wary of anyone, including himself, who claims to possess truth, he sometimes slips into language that is pompous. There is a sense of lack of connectedness to, let alone rootedness in, the family of western thinkers on whom he seems to rest his case. But the essay is never boring and always provokes reaction.