THE
P RTAL
October 2018
Page 10
Thoughts on Newman
Newman on Poetry
Dr Stephen Morgan
A utumn seems
to me to be the most poetic of seasons. We are all, I suspect, affected by the
annual descent from the fullness of summer into the initial fruitfulness of the season that gives way to
the barrenness of the coming winter.
Poetic images soften the blow of what is, inescapably,
a season marked by decline. How much easier to cope
with the leaves turning colour and falling, with the
return of damp and cold and the final harvest of those
autumn berries – blackberry and sloe, hips and haws
– if we adopt John Keats’ language of the “season of
mists and mellow fruitfulness” rather than the cold
register of science.
complete, synthetic way of knowing: one that went
beyond a reductive scientism, whilst rejecting
none of the proper truth-claims science offers, to a
deeper, richer understanding. In perhaps his most
intellectually difficult book, An Essay in Aid of a
Grammar of Assent, he utilised a concept well enough
known to the medieval philosophers and theo