A philosophical poet is a poetic writer who employs poetic devices to explore subjects common to the field of philosophy, esp. those revolving around language: e.g., philosophy of language, semiotics, phenomenology, hermeneutics, literary theory, psychoanalysis, and critical theory.[1] Philosophical poets, like mystics, anchor themselves, through an ideal, to the intelligible form of the object by juxtaposing its symbols and qualities.[2][3][4] They rely on intuition and the intersubjectivity of their senses to depict reality.[5][4] Their writings address truth through figurative language (i.e. metaphor) in questions related to the meaning of life, the nature of being (ontology), theories of knowledge and knowing (epistemology), principles of beauty (aesthetics), first principles of things (metaphysics) or the existence of God.[6]
[T]he philosophical experience of language that seeks to understand the origins of language itself, and which proceeds from the opposite direction, provides a fitting complement to the poetic experience.
Poetry, more specifically metaphor, discloses that it is possible to apply symbols to an object...as a predication or qualification of a particular object. ... to penetrate more and more deeply into its qualitative nature—to enrich contemplation. ... to juxtapose [objects]...to evoke the quality which they share. ... [T]he poem [is] an individual object of contemplation, not a set of general propositions claiming truth...[but] qualities which constitute and organize.
[L]ike poetry, philosophy, too, must idealize, but it cannot idealize itself out of this world and remain philosophy; it is the poetic, the word, the bodily word which helps to maintain philosophy's human scale[.]
[As opposed to poets and novelists,] the mystic, if he describes his inner torments, focuses his expectation on an object within which he manages to anchor himself. ... [the mystic] tends much more toward sensation than the poet, for it is by sensation that he verges upon God.
Recall for Bergson that the intellect can deal only with the immobile, and its knowledge is incomplete. Intuition, however, grows out of instinct and sympathy, and the reason intuition is a knowledge that is absolute and complete is that it is a knowledge through and of the body[.]
The categories of truth and existence are irrelevant to poetry. ... The poem does, nevertheless, contain certain features essential to truth ... [T]he poem can be described as true only metaphorically[.]