The Language of Beauty

In Narnia and Beyond, a guide to the fiction of C. S. Lewis, Thomas Howard writes, "poetry (the literature of high imagination) carries the legitimate interest of all measurers and analysts (geographers, astrophysicists, all of us) on through to the clarity and intensity implicit in that interest from the outset" (71).

I wonder what many moderns, with their dichotomy between the bona fide disciplines (i.e. sciences) and the more feigned ones (i.e. humanities), would think of this; for Howard claims that poetry does indeed carry weight for all mankind.

Obviously this claim begs further explanation; and Howard, in typical fashion, gives it:

That is, if the botanist for example, finding himself galvanized by the efficiency and symmetry of the life forms he is scrutinizing, continues to press the question implicit in notions like efficiency and symmetry, he is going to find himself reaching for such words as "beauty" and "pleasure" and "awe", and at this point he is going to need poetry, at least if he wants language to chart these latter developments in his study. It is not that poetry or the poetic imagination uncovers some arcane significance in things that a cloddish scientific analysis cannot hope to see: rather we may say that the poetic imagination wants to speak with a language that charts how we mortals see these phenomena, the thing implicit in poetry all along being that there is perhaps no truer way to speak of the phenomena.

Thoughts?

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