1/ From Don Share’s post at Har­riet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog, refer­ring to an arti­cle by Richard Rorty that appears in the new issue of Poetry:

Rorty knew he was dying from pan­cre­atic cancer at the time he was work­ing on the piece. When asked by his son whether the read­ing or writ­ing of phi­los­o­phy gave him any com­fort, he said, surprisingly… no: “neither the phi­los­o­phy I had writ­ten nor that which I had read seemed to have any par­tic­u­lar bear­ing on my situation.” “Hasn’t any­thing you’ve read been of any use?” his son per­sisted. “Yes,” Rorty reports blurt­ing out, “poetry.” He explained:

“I now wish that I had spent some­what more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are inca­pable of state­ment in prose. There are no such truths; there is noth­ing about death that Swin­burne and Landor knew but Epi­cu­rus and Hei­deg­ger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends. Cul­tures with richer vocab­u­lar­ies are more fully human — farther removed from the beasts — than those with poorer ones; indi­vid­ual men and women are more fully human when their mem­o­ries are amply stocked with verses.”

2/ From Plato’s Phaedo:

Cebes: [Evenus] wanted to know why you who never before wrote a line of poetry, now that you are in prison are putting Aesop into verse, and also com­pos­ing that hymn to Apollo.

Tell him, Cebes, [Socrates] replied, that I had no idea of rivalling him or his poems; which is the truth, for I knew that I could not do that. But I wanted to see whether I could purge away a scru­ple which I felt about cer­tain dreams. In the course of my life I have often had inti­ma­tions in dreams “that I should make music.” That same dream came to me some­times in one form, and some­times in another, but always saying the same or nearly the same words: Make and cul­ti­vate music, said the dream. And hith­erto I had imag­ined that this was only intended to exhort and encour­age me in the study of phi­los­o­phy, which has always been the pur­suit of my life, and is the noblest and best of music. The dream was bid­ding me to do what I was already doing, in the same way that the com­peti­tor in a race is bidden by the spec­ta­tors to run when he is already run­ning. But I was not cer­tain of this, as the dream might have meant music in the pop­u­lar sense of the word, and being under sen­tence of death…I thought that I should be safer if I sat­is­fied the scru­ple, and, in obe­di­ence to the dream, com­posed a few verses before I departed.