The image, in its simplicity, has no need of scholarship. It is the property of a naïve consciousness; in its expression, it is youthful language. The poet, in the novelty of his images, is always the origin of language. To specify exactly what a phenomenology of the image can be, to specify that the image comes before thought, we should have to say that poetry, rather than being a phenomenology of the mind, is a phenomenology of the soul. We should then have to collect documentation on the subject of the dreaming consciousness.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, xiv-xx
The transmutation is a reforming of the language, not the disappearance of the praised object into existing patterns of words foreordained responses. It is, as David Jones said of all art that is in any sense representation, a ‘showing forth under another form’; and for this to be serious, it entails some sens at some stage of loss of control, unclarity of focus. A celebratory work that simply uses a repertoire of stick techniques that direct our attention not to what is being celebrated but to the smooth and finished quality of its own surface is a failure. So with the language of praise for God: it needs to do its proper work, to articulate the sense of answering to a reality not already embedded in the conventions of speech; to show the novum of God’s action in respect of any pre-existing human idiom.
Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology, 9
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