Poets are visionaries

Poets are more prophetically disposed than prose writers. Not that prose writers are not visionary, and they are immensely, for it is vision that gives a writer something different, something of otherworldliness. which is ordinarily otherwise hard to come by. There will not be clear line drawn between such visionary prose writers, and Khalil Gibran's writings give me that feeling. He was really a great mystic poet, and even his prose are very poetic.

Poems touch the essence of life, the very core of what we are, the depth of the subconscious, and definitely it is not that easy to fathom the depth of what poets have plumbed. William Blake's poems, for instance transcend limits of the doctrinaire. Ideas that spring from the kernel go expressed in poems as they are ion their coarse forms, unrefined and undefined. At times the very unconscious is
canvased.

At times when I read great poems I feel I get lost in the poem, and I will be immersed or be at one with the poem.

Anciently great truths were expressed through poems. The Mahabharata, th eBhagabatam were written in verses.

If one wants to explore into the spiritual domain it is to poems he or she must return. Read Gibran's ppems, Rumi in Sufism you will be spiritually transported I do not know where.

Blake was a bit touched and I doubt if most of his best work is in the lumpy 'prophetic' books where he turned his own personal theologies into an art under the impression he was possessed of Milton's spirit. But many poets have seen themselves as a breed apart at least as regards language. Generally the good poets are masters of language but I do not concede that they are the 'unacknowledged legislators'

Here's part of a great poem by a poet who was not afraid to blow his own trumpet and was talented enough to be able to see himself in visionary terms with some justification.

from Tristan Da Cunha

Snore in the foam; the night is vast and blind;
The blanket of the mist about your shoulders,
Sleep your old sleep of rock, snore in the wind,
Snore in the spray! The storm your slumber lulls,
His wings are folded on your nest of boulders
As on their eggs the grey wings of your gulls.


....

The poet is Roy Campbell

Quote:

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Originally Posted by blazeofglory

Poets are more prophetically disposed than prose writers. Not that prose writers are not visionary, and they are immensely, for it is vision that gives a writer something different, something of otherworldliness. which is ordinarily otherwise hard to come by. There will not be clear line drawn between such visionary prose writers, and Khalil Gibran's writings give me that feeling. He was really a great mystic poet, and even his prose are very poetic.

Poems touch the essence of life, the very core of what we are, the depth of the subconscious, and definitely it is not that easy to fathom the depth of what poets have plumbed. William Blake's poems, for instance transcend limits of the doctrinaire. Ideas that spring from the kernel go expressed in poems as they are ion their coarse forms, unrefined and undefined. At times the very unconscious is
canvased.

At times when I read great poems I feel I get lost in the poem, and I will be immersed or be at one with the poem.

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very nicely put. I think that's the reason that we appreciate poets. I think you mean visionary here not by its literary meaning (otherwise, I would recall Don McClean's Starry Strarry Night; in this sense, Bob Dylan is a good one too; his lyrics writings are very visonary). For its Predictionary sense, absolutely right, Shelly's "O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"
, such a simple but profound/powerful sentence! However, a real poet's life or living as a poet is not easy at all, like lots of passed aways, theirs are so hard.