To see a world in a grain of sand. Poetry & philosophy for a civilisation in distress. A conversation with Valentin Gerlier

What has poetry to do with philosophy? Why might poetry particularly matter now? How did figures from Plato to Einstein value the poetic voice?

Valentin Gerlier and Mark Vernon return for another conversation about the manner in which we humans are gifted with symbolic as well as cognitive imaginations. They ask why we keep returning to poets such as William Blake and William Shakespeare, how the wellspring of a civilisation is found in its mythos, and whether a literal age might be recovering the age of sense of transcendence that is also immanent.  

In short, they ask why seeing a world in a grain of sand, and not just a grain of sand in a grain of sand, might matter.

Their first conversation was released as Heaven in a Wild Flower.