Product Review

From the days of the first shamans, through Homer, Dante, the traditional ballads, Rumi, Blake, Emily Dickinson and Lew Welch, poetry has been rooted in metaphysics. In What Poets Used To Know: Poetics, Mythopoesis, Metaphysics, Charles Upton presents poetry both as a set of contemplative techniques and as a key to the accumulated lore hoard of the human race. If The ABC of Reading had been written not by Ezra Pound but by Owen Barfield or René Guénon or Robert Graves, it might have looked something like this. What Poets Used To Know does what it can to restore poetry to its original theurgic function: the concentrated expression of human and spiritual truth.