Poetry leads to a better world and also to paradise

 

Why is poetry important in a man's life, as it is the fear of God?

If the fear of God holds back and fortifies humility, in the sense that it prevents us from violating the sacred that human beings should carry with themselves (they should indeed - but in reality, barely a minority carry it, but let's take it for granted that they carry it), poetry is instead what arouses emotion linked to an insight coming from an image that suddenly appears to us and touches the depths of our souls. It wedges itself into our souls and emotions explode.

Poetry operates within a dynamic and non-static time, dynamic as children experience it but static as adults endure it. For this reason poetry marvels and surprises. Only in a dynamic vision of existence, such as that of a child, human beings can be surprised, and they remain instead impassive withered and dry in the static existence of adults because they mostly live a time of habits, of routine. Poetry in this sense makes us children and as children it opens the door to a better world, taking us out of the take of habits and routine and also opening the way to heaven as Christ reminds us in the Gospels.

Poetry, while not primarily investigating the theological level of history, or rather the way in which the signs of God's will are manifested in history nonetheless convey us to the appropriate disposition for developing the components that make us become the hinge between the man of our saeculum and the man of the City of God.

The poet does not have necessarily believe in God and the City of God, but as a poet, he is in the adequate disposition to be able to think of that city, even if he should not think of it at all.