Poetry, in so far as the metaphysics of any absolute knowledge extends, is simply the concrete _evidence_ of the _experience_ of a recognition (_knowledge_ if you like). It can give you a _ratio_ of fact and experience, and in this sense it is both perception and thing perceived, according as it approaches a significant articulation or not. This is its reality, its fact, _being_. When you attempt to ask more of poetry,--the fact of man’s relationship to a hypothetical god, be it Osiris, Zeus or Indra, you will get as variant terms even from the abstract terminology of philosophy as you will from poetry; whereas poetry, without attempting to logically enunciate such a problem or its solution, may well give you the real connective experience, the very “sign manifest” on which rests the assumption of a godhead. I’m perfectly aware of my wholesale lack of knowledge. But as Allen said, what exactly do you mean by “knowledge”? When you ask for exact factual data (a graphic map of eternity?), ethical morality or moral classifications, etc., from poetry--you not only limit its goal, you ask its subordination to science, philosophy. Is it not equally logical to expect Stravinsky to bring his fiddles into dissent with the gravitation theories of Sir Isaac Newton? They _are_ in dissent with this scientist, as a matter of fact, and organically so; for the group mind that Stravinsky appeals to has already been freed from certain of the limitations of experience and consciousness that dominated both the time and the mind of Newton. Science (ergo all exact knowledge and its instruments of operation) is in perfect antithesis to poetry. (Painting, architecture, music, as well). It operates from an exactly opposite polarity, and it may equate with poetry, but when it does so its statement of such is in an entirely different terminology. I hope you get this difference between _inimical_ and _antithetical_, intended here. It is not my interest to discredit science, it has been as inspired as poetry,--and if you could but recognize it, much more hypothetically motivated. What you admire in Plato as “divine sanity” is the architecture of his logic. Plato doesn’t live today because of the intrinsic “truth” of his statements: their only living truth today consists in the “fact” of their harmonious relationship to each other in the context of his organization of them. This grace partakes of poetry. But Plato was primarily a philosopher, and you must admit that grace is a secondary motive in philosophical statement, at least until the hypothetical basis of an initial “truth” has been accepted--not in the name of beauty, form or experience, but in the name of rationality. No wonder Plato considered the banishment of poets;--their reorganizations of chaos on basis perhaps divergent from his own threatened the logic of _his_ system, itself founded on assumptions that demanded the very defense of poetic construction which he was fortunately able to provide.