Poetry, like alchemy, is largely ignored, and is effectively marginalized from mainstream culture. Most people couldn't care less about either artform, and yet both house so much of value to humanity. Poets, like alchemists, are dwellers on the fringe; often characterized, somewhat tragically, as undesirables, freaks or lunatics. Poets are interpreters of, as A.E. Waite put it in his little-known masterpiece, Azoth; or The Star in the East, “the unrealizable beauty of that which is behind the veil,” doing so ‘by the graciousness of the veil.”
As he so eloquently states:
“In this matter the poets are our only interpreters – that is, legitimately – because the problem is outside science, which is concerned with the veil alone; and it is outside ordinary philosophy, because ordinary philosophy has affirmed that the reality is unknowable; and the best conclusions from analogy are to be learned of the masters of analogy, of the kings of interpretation, of those who see furthest, who possess that intuition which is the deepest instrument of supersensual research, and is in fact that higher faculty, that sixth sense, at which we have already hinted, which we now openly affirm is par excellence the mystical instrument. Those only who are in touch with poetry can have part in the life to come. It is therefore eminently, and before all things necessary, that we should see after the manner of the poets, and the mystical philosophy of Nature is to be found in them.”
Source: Alchemy Journal
