To read a good poem well is to have ones vision restored," states the author of this study. Here, Guite explains how an encounter with a good poem allows a reader to discover overlooked truths and restores a balance our age has lost.

Faith Hope and Poetry
Introduction:Poetry and transfiguration: Reading for a new vision
To read a good poem well is to have your vision restored. Encounter at depth with good poetry allows you to see truths you have been missing and restores and redresses a balance our age has lost. As the Nobel prize winner Seamus Heaney puts it poetry "offers a clarification, a fleeting glimpse of a potential order of things "beyond confusion", a glimpse that has to be its own reward." The purpose of this book is to enter into those transformations of vision offered us by some of the great poems of the past and of our own age so that we can see things in a new way, a way which offers to restore some of the faith and hope which is missing from our culture.
1)What must poetry restore?
If we ask why the modern Western culture has lost this life-enhancing vision, why there is an imbalance that needs to be redressed, we have to look back to the great cultural shift that occurred during the Enlightenment which ushered in a mistrust of and marginalisation of imaginative and poetic vision which had very far-reaching effects. Instead of acknowledging, as many thinkers do now, that the way we know, the language through which we know, is part of knowledge itself, philosophers of the Enlightenment thought that image and imagination simply clouded and obscured the pure dry knowledge which they were after, and so they tried, in the words of Thomas Sprat, writing as it were the manifesto of the age, in his History of the Royal Society:
to separate the knowledge of Nature, from the colours of Rhetoric, the devices of Fancy or the delightful deceit of Fables.
This is in very sharp contrast to the wisdom of the previous age which was rooted in the idea that fables, stories and myths were the medium which most completely embodied the deepest truths we need to know, so that most of the wisdom of the ancient world as well as to the Judaeo-Christian tradition was in fact embodied in myth story and song. The notion of telling a fable in order to get at a truth went very deep indeed, and emerges for example even in the light-hearted exchange between Audrey and Touchstone the fool in As You Like It, though it should be said that Shakespeare, with a true understanding of the cross, always puts his greatest wisdom in the mouths of his fools:
Audrey: I do not know what 'poetical' is. Is it honest in deed and word? Is it a true thing?
Touchstone: No, truly; for the true st poetry is the most feigning..."
But the attack is not only on story but on the poetry of image and metaphor, Sprat goes on to demand:
"a close, naked, natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness, bringing all things as near the mathematical -plainness as they can, and preferring the language of the artisans, countrymen and merchants before that of wits and scholars"
These men had declared war on the imagination and in the treaty at the end of that war there was a kind of cultural apartheid. The entire realm of "objective" truth was to be the exclusive terrain of Reason at its narrowest and the faculties of Imagination and Intuition were only relevant to a purely private and "subjective" truth. If it can't be weighed and measured, these men were saying, it's not really there. How prophetic Blake, the great rebel against this division was, when he wrote in A vision of Judgement:
"What it will be Question'd, "when the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?" O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty."