"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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discourse, but as a fundamental means of initiating discovery, we shall better
understand its value as a part of theory for Darwin” (ibid.). At the start of a chapter
titled “Analogy, metaphor and narrative in The Origin”, Beer reminds us that Aristotle in
the Poetics wrote that metaphor is a sign of genius (73), and ends the chapter with a
statement about the power of metaphor to communicate the otherwise inexplicable:
The quagmire of the metaphoric troubles Darwin, yet he needs it – he needs its
tendency to suggest more or other than you meant to say, to make the latent
actual, to waken sleeping dogs, and equally, he needs its powers of persuasion
through lassitude, through our inattention. (95)
Livingstone’s poetry is similarly a startling mixture of hard-nosed scientific fact and rich
metaphor. A full understanding of his poetry requires rigour and scientific research on the
part of the reader. But this difficulty is not insurmountable and the advantage is that
Livingstone’s use of science in his poetry gives it a greater depth and pertinence. The
poetry presents a fuller picture of how the world works.
Sidney and Shelley both laud poetry over prose. While literature in general has an
obvious role within ecocriticism (the expression of ecological awareness through
literature) Bate’s argument that poetry is “an especially efficient system for recycling the
richest thoughts and feelings of a community” (247) is compelling. Shelley compares
poetry and prose:
A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this
difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached
facts, which have no other bond of connexion than time, place, circumstance,
cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable
forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the
image of all other minds. (in Reiman 485)
He is here assuming a common humanity perhaps akin to C.G. Jung’s collective
unconscious and becomes more vague when talking about the ‘ingredients’ of a poem.
But, how does one define what makes up “eternal truth”? Livingstone partly resolves this
conundrum by positing a Creative Principle. Later Shelley says: “Poetry lifts the veil
from the hidden beauty of the world” (487). In the end, I think that only poetry can
explain poetry.
Just as the nature of poetry is, essentially, indefinable so, too, is humankind’s
place on Earth. We don’t really know why we are here and this is why we struggle to
know how to be on the Earth. If this were not so, would Heidegger, for example, have