The Poet's Vision

La poesía no quiere adeptos, quiere amantes.

—Federico García Lorca

“The poetry of earth is never dead.” So writes John Keats in his 1816 sonnet, “On the Grasshopper and the Cricket.” Recalling the dual meanings of the Greek kosmos, Robert Penn Warren tells us, “Beauty is another name for the world.” Indeed, the Beauty of God’s Creation is always calling to us. While the study of theology, especially theology in the tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, beloved of both Aquinas and Dante, helps us to understand that Beauty is a transcendental attribute of God, who, as the actus purus, is the ground of all Being, it is the poet’s task to help us see this Beauty in Creation all around us, to help us love the Beauty of Creation in such a way as to point us toward its source in God. The poet’s task is to make something beautiful, to reveal, in Baudelaire’s words, “the presence of the infinite in the finite.”