A poet sees exactly what both you and I see, but the poet goes a step further — she packages that insight into an expression that momentarily washes away the clouds in front of our eyes. Heidegger spent a lot of time grappling with what it means to think and to be. But after writing his magnum opus Being and Time, perhaps the most influential work of philosophy written in the 20th century, he began to intuit that maybe pure philosophical language wasn’t enough to capture this aspect of the human experience, and his later fascination with art was born from this realization. Poetry, he thought, was the form that came closest to closing this gap between language and experience.

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