Poetry and Technology

I used to think that it is the kind of knowledge pursued by science and technology that sets constraints and limits on us, that tells us what we can and cannot do, that gets to the hard-nosed, rock-bottom facts of the world; and I used to think that poets and artists inhabited a realm of unconstrained freedom of imagination. Poets, in this view, are the ones who flee from the harsh realities of the real world revealed by Reason, into the happy lands of fantasy and imagination.

I was wrong. It is science and technology that refuse nothing. For the dogmatists of secular rationalism, Knowledge is Power. There is nothing in the universe that cannot be, that should not be, unveiled. Nothing is inviolate.

And what of the poets then? They are the refusers. It is they who set limits, who disclose concrete, particular, and personal worlds. They speak to us out of intimacy. They are the guardians of the inviolate individual, of the mystery of the Person. (--Tom Cheetham, After Prophecy, 5).