ABSTRACT

Poetry operates within a realm already opened up by language in this sense – as does science too, however different they are from each other. The poet thus contributes to, extends language. In his use of language he carries forward the language's work to give people a world – that world which is opened up to them in the course of their learning to speak. In the Symposium Plato, speaking through Diotima, also speaks in this way: ascending from the love of beauty in particular objects, people and scenes, to pure, undiluted, universal beauty. In the absence of a language people would have no souls and the world in which they live would be empty of a whole dimension of reality which constitutes the realm to which the objects of those responses in which their souls come to life belong.