This is from an essay I wrote recently about modes of philosophical thought:
Poetry, actual poetry as it has been conceived and practiced since Homer, has always displayed a complex (sometimes tempestuous) relationship with the unsaid. In as much as poetry attempts to exhaust the possibilities of speech, it represents the outer frontier of speech, and that frontier implies a beyond — an abyss where speech ceases. Poetry necessarily lives along the edge of silence. Now, this touches one of the secret histories of philosophy. A tradition that has shown little coyness in talking about anything and everything has long harbored a covert fascination with what cannot be said. It is right there at the beginning (we return to Parmenides):
“Neither will I allow you to say
Or to think that it grew from what-is-not, for that it is not
Cannot be spoken or thought.”
And it’s still going strong in 1922 when Wittgenstein delivers his dour injunction: “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.” This intimation of a limit seems to prompt two divergent responses. One is a tactful withdrawal, an ascetic refusal to engage with whatever lies beyond the frontier of speech. This is an ethic of thought that crystalized on the morning Kant woke from his dogmatic slumbers to declare that the “thing in itself” cannot be directly known, and is especially manifest in the cautious, willfully mundane ruminations of the British analytic school. The opposite inclination is to borrow the poet’s garb and push language to its breaking point, that is to say, to the point where words no longer make sense. Poetry challenges a tacit agreement between speaker and listener, the agreement we call “meaning”, and proposes a new agreement that might be better indicated by the term “experience.” Now the Poetic mode in philosophy shows just this tendency. Averse to Kantian prohibitions, its practitioners go for broke, tossing metaphors, ellipses, neologisms and non-sequiturs in the mental pathway of their readers.