It is as though poetry laid a hand on our arm and said, "Now steady. You are missing this in your prosaic dash past experience, and it is worth not missing."
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This is part of the business of poetry, from the nursery rhyme to the Divine Comedy. It addresses our imagination and, with everything that is at its service, it tries to beguile us into the intense awareness of experience. It knows that our attention is cudgeled by functional concerns morning, noon, and night, and it suspects that this not the desideratum. But it does not call us away from the "real" world of function into a garden of fancy that never existed anywhere. Rather, its high office is to ransom us from thrall to the deadly myth that life is cluttered and obstructed by necessity, and to return us to life with the awareness that is packed with glory.
-Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance?, 72-73.
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