Poetry's legislation

There's a marvellous piece by George Szirtes in today's Guardian. He's defending and commending poetry:

The sweetest sound in all the world, said Finn MacCool of Irish legend, was the music of what happens. The music of what happens is the sensation of being alive to any event, from insects running about in a square of grass and the sun moving down a brick wall, to the power of a volcano, the fall of a temple or the death of a child. Or the deaths of thousands. The human mind encounters and accommodates all this.
.....
It is... vital to love and distrust language. It is absolutely vital to tell truths that catch something of the complex polyphonic music of what happens. Someone has got to do it. It is poetry's unique task to say exactly what it means by singing it and dancing it, by carving some crystalline pattern on the thin, cold surface of language, thereby keeping language audible and usable. That is its straightness. That is its legislation.

Read the rest. Tomorrow George is giving this year's T.S. Eliot lecture.