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History and Philosophy: Tilted By Poetry
POETRY: A NEW WORLD FOR HISTORY
History is philosophy teaching by experience.
-Carlyle in Fabricating History: English Writers on the French Revolution, , Barton Friedman, Princeton UP, 1988, p.17.
The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention, and ‘discovers’ a new world within the known world.
-D.H. Lawrence in Acts of Attention: The Poems of D.H. Lawrence, Sandra Gilbert, Cornell UP, London, 1972, p.5.
Historical knowledge rendered meaningful
by conformity to some teleological model,
some linguistic construct which we actualize,
reconfigure as we read, shooting the present
with chips of messianic time,
my consciousness with ever higher levels
of connectedness, shooting my life
with questions which recreate some microcosm
in its depth, breadth, beyond the narrow,
distorted into vistas, multiple dimensions,
in the theatre of eternity; for written history
is always ‘history-for’, never divorced
from complicating contexts, condensed,
chosen, displaced, elaborated, rationalized,
structured, emphasized, extrapolated,
vantage-pointed, like the images of a dream
intending some manifest content,
some knowledgework, analogous to life:
far beyond some sequence of rosary beads,
some simple linearity, some neutral facticity.
Ron Price
22 October 1995
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Ron Price is a retired teacher, aged 67(in 2011). He taught for 35 years and is now a writer and editor, a poet and publisher. He has been a Baha'i for 52 years(also in 2011) 
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