The Poetic Conception of Life (interview question #14)
Dr Simon Ussher has started emailing me interview questions about my recent books on aesthetics (see here). Over coming weeks I’ll post my responses to his questions.
As well as music, you often speak of poetry and the poetic, which is perhaps not surprising since you are a writer with a love of language. Why is poetry important to your work? And why do you feel it is necessary or important to speak of life and the universe as having a ‘poetic’ nature or quality to it?
Poetry is a central trope that informs how I interpret existence, though perhaps not always in the conventional literary sense. When I speak of ‘the poetic’, I mean something broader and more fundamental than simply writing poems. I mean a mode of perceiving, inhabiting, and responding to existence – a way of encountering the world with heightened attentiveness, imagination, sensibility, and openness to mystery.
In that respect, poetry is not merely one art form among others; it is almost a disposition toward reality itself. The poetic names a way of seeing that resists reducing existence to utility, calculation, and instrumental reason. Modern industrial civilisation tends to approach the world primarily as a ‘resource’ – something to exploit, quantify, optimise, and consume. The poetic attitude interrupts that orientation. It allows beings to appear not merely as objects of use but as presences worthy of contemplation, wonder, reverence, and aesthetic appreciation.
This is one reason poetry matters politically and ecologically. The ecological crisis is not merely a technological or economic problem; it is also a crisis of perception and imagination. A civilisation incapable of seeing beauty in the living world will inevitably destroy it. As I said earlier, if forests become nothing but timber reserves, rivers become drainage systems, and human beings become labour inputs or consumers, then exploitation follows almost automatically. The poetic dimension of consciousness re-enchants the world against this flattening logic.
Human beings do not merely occupy physical space biologically; we inhabit worlds of meaning, symbol, imagination, and interpretation. We dwell through language, stories, rituals, myths, and aesthetic practices. Poetry discloses dimensions of existence that purely technical language cannot adequately grasp. This matters because many of the realities I am trying to explore in SMPLCTY and Homo Aestheticus – beauty, meaning, suffering, transcendence, creativity, ecological belonging, cosmic finitude – cannot be fully captured in purely analytic or scientific discourse. Rational analysis is indispensable, of course. I rely heavily on ecological economics, energy studies, political theory, and philosophy throughout my writing. But there are existential truths that concepts alone struggle to communicate.
That is why I often turn toward mythopoetic language, metaphor, archetype, and speculative cosmological imagery. When I speak of the ‘Will to Art’, the ‘poet-farmer’, ‘creative evolution’, or ‘the aesthetic universe’, I am not presenting scientific theories in the narrow sense. I am attempting to articulate orienting visions – symbolic frameworks through which human beings might interpret their place in existence more meaningfully.
Poetry becomes important because human beings are not sustained by facts alone. We live through narratives, images, symbols, and myths. Consumer capitalism understands this perfectly, which is why it saturates society with advertising, spectacle, and aspirational imagery. The ecological movement often fails because it speaks too often only in the language of crisis, statistics, and sacrifice. Those are necessary, but insufficient. Civilisations are ultimately moved by visions of beauty and meaning.
I think poetry also matters because existence itself exceeds conceptual closure. Reality is mysterious. Consciousness is mysterious. Being itself is mysterious. The universe gives rise to beauty, love, music, grief, creativity, and self-awareness – and we still do not fully understand what any of this means. Poetry honours that excess of meaning. It resists premature reductionism.
So when I describe the universe as having a ‘poetic’ quality, I do not mean that nature is literally composed like a poem by some divine author. Rather, I mean that existence displays qualities we ordinarily associate with the poetic: creativity, ambiguity, rhythm, emergence, metaphorical depth, emotional resonance, and inexhaustibility of language and interpretation. The world is not simply a machine; it is something much stranger and more expressive than that.
Human consciousness itself reveals this. We are beings who transform raw experience into stories, songs, rituals, philosophies, artworks, and symbolic worlds. We cannot help but interpret existence poetically because meaning itself is fundamentally imaginative and aesthetic. This is why I say that life itself can become an aesthetic project. We are not merely organisms adapting mechanically to environments. We are self-interpreting beings continually shaping our identities, values, and forms of life. In that sense, everyone is already participating in a kind of lived poetry, whether consciously or not.
Poetry is especially important in an age of ecological crisis because we are confronting not merely policy failures but spiritual exhaustion. The dominant myths of endless growth, technological salvation, and consumer fulfillment are losing credibility. But human beings cannot live without orienting narratives. We need new stories capable of guiding us toward ecological civilisation.
That is partly what I am trying to contribute through concepts like SMPLCTY and homo aestheticus. These are not just academic categories. They are mythopoetic attempts to imagine other ways of being human on Earth – ways that are grounded not in domination and accumulation, but in beauty, sufficiency, creativity, and participation in the deeper rhythms of existence.
Perhaps poetry matters most because it teaches us how to dwell within uncertainty and finitude without despair. A poem does not eliminate mystery; it intensifies and illuminates it. Likewise, the goal of philosophy, at least as I understand it, is not necessarily to solve existence like a technical problem, but to help us inhabit existence more beautifully and truthfully while the mystery remains.
