Science and Poetry

"Misunderstanding and under-estimation of poetry is mainly due
to over-estimation of the thought in it. We can see still more clearly
that thought is not the prime factor if we consider for a moment not
the experience of the reader but that of the poet. Why does the poet
use these words and no others? Not because they stand for a series
of thoughts which in themselves are what he is concerned to communicate.
It is never what a poem says which matters, but what it is. The poet
is not writing as a sicentist. He uses these words because the interests
which the situation calls into play combine to bring them, just in this form,
into his consciousness as a means of ordering, controlling and consolidating
the whole experience. The experience itself, the tide of impulses
sweeping through the mind, is the source and the sanction of the words.
They represent this experience itself, not any set of perceptions or reflections,
though often to a reader who approaches the poem wrongly they
will seem to be only a series of remarks about other things. But to
a suitable reader the words - if they actually spring from experience
and are not due to verbal habits, to the desire to be effective, to factitious
excogitation, to imitation, to irrelevant contrivances, or to any other of
the failings which prevent most people from writing poetry - the words
will reproduce in his mind a similar play of interest putting him for the
while into a similar situation and leading to the same response."

I. A. Richards
in Science and Poetry
(1926)