SOURCE: "The Experience of Poetry in a Scientific Age," in Poets on Poetry, edited by Howard Nemerov, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1966, pp. 147-59.

In the following excerpt, Swenson discusses poetry as an art and compares poetry to science.

What is the experience of poetry? Choosing to analyze this experience for myself after an engrossment of many years, I see it based in a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming. This ambition involves a paradox: an instinctive belief in the senses as exquisite tools for this investigation and, at the same time, a suspicion about their crudeness. They may furnish easy deceptions or partial distortions:

 Hold a dandelion and look at the sun.
Two spheres are side by side.
Each has a yellow ruff.

Eye, you...