Today I am making poets.(well that’s me introducing the quote on my “role” as teacher.)

To use Doug Noon, for he steered me to this reading as he often does….
again I have a SI Hawakawa and Alan Hayakawa quote….
they co-wrote Language in Thought and Action

Symbols for Our Times

“Poets,” said Shelley, “are the acknowledged legislators of the world.”

Poets, by creating new ways of feeling and percieving , help to create the new ways of thinking that bring us to terms with a changing world. Every age finds its appropriate symbols. In medieval times, religious images symbolized what people believed in and lived by” God, the angels, and the saints. In Renaissance times, the prevailing image was that of the human body, which was used in endless ways to symbolize the ideas of an age of humanism.
“With what symbols shall the poet bring us to terms with the realities of our own times? In the past few decades, whole new areas of thought and exploration have been opened up by the sciences-by electronics, by astrophysics, by microbiology, by the study of nucleoproteins and their role in genetics, by radioactive tracer studies, and by nuclear physics. Instant communications bring us unsettling news from parts of the world that we never thought about before, Astronauts shoot through space, so that the limits of the planet we live on are no longer the limits of our exploration. We can, and do describe these new developments in the language of science, but how are we to take these new and urgent realities into our hearts as well as our minds, unless poets give us new images with which to experience them?”