Poetry and a Liberal Arts Education

This is Episode 13 of the Consortium Podcast, an academic audio blog of Kepler Education.

In this episode, Scott and Joffre discuss the importance of poetry in a liberal arts education. Poetry is more philosophical than history, says Aristotle. And this means poetry gives us insight into the human condition: what humans might do as opposed to history, which tells us what humans have done.

The Romantic poet, Percy Shelley noted that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. In a sense, they are prophets in the truth-telling sense (rather than the prognosticating sense) because poetry serendipitously offers flashes of wisdom and delightful insight, further cultivating the human imagination. Poetry also enriches other forms of communication by actualizing the music of language, turns of phrases and figures of speech.