As I describe in the book, the "scientific gaze," which reduces reality to raw material "stuff," bleaches the world of value and meaning. We can think of poetry, then, as the opposite of the scientific gaze. The "poetic gaze" sees reality as suffused with meaning and value. As I argue in Hunting Magic Eels, poetry helps us recover a sacramental ontology. All of life becomes sign and symbol.
Given this view of poetry, I was stuck by how C.S. Lewis, with a correspondent in 1949, once described the relationship between language, poetry and reality. Lewis wrote:
In a sense, one can hardly put anything into words: only the simplest colours have names, and hardly any of the smells. The simple physical pains and (still more) the pleasures can't be expressed in language. I labour the point lest the devil should hereafter try to make you believe that what was wordless was therefore vague and nebulous. But in reality it is just the clearest, the most concrete, and most indubitable realities which escape language: not because they are vague but because language is ... Poetry I take to be the continual effort to bring language back to the actual.
