The Orphic Voice by Elizabeth Sewell

A probing study of poetic imagination that treats the ‘‘Orphic’’ mode as the way poetry mediates between nature, myth, and human consciousness; it argues that poetic language shapes perception and knowledge, contending that mythic and imaginative forms remain essential for interpreting experience even in an age of scientific explanation, and reads literary and philosophical materials to show how the poetic voice both reflects and reshapes our understanding of self and world.