Adam Zagajewski* (via a friend, by email):
Don’t we use the word poetry in two ways? One: as a part of literature. Two: as a tiny part of the world, both human and pre-human, the part of beauty. So poetry as literature, as language, discovers within the world a layer that has existed unobserved in reality, and by doing so changes something in our life, expands somewhat the space of what we are. So yes, it has the power to restore the mutilated world, even if no statistics ever show it.
What he’s trying to describe here—this second usage of poetry—is what Anne called romance, or sometimes scope for the imagination.
L. M. Montgomery (from the chapter “Poetry and Prose”):
*I stole the title of this whole shebang from (shockingly enough) Adam Zagajewski’s “How to Praise the Mutilated World.”
