Scientific vs. Fictional Literature Revisited

I've been rereading a previous entry on my blog "Scientific vs. Fictional Literature," and as so often happens, I ran across a related passage in a book I'm now reading: Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry by Stephen Dobyns.

"As I said, we go to poetry and the other arts for knowledge, to expand our moral experience of the world, for sustenance, survival, and connection. The degree to which we get this necessary mixture from textbooks, biographies, memoirs, and journalism is limited. We see the apparent effects of a series of uncertain causes. These forms of nonfiction present us with the shadow, while the arts have the ability to present us with the living body. Doesn't one learn more about whaling from Moby Dick than from the best piece of nonfiction written on the subject?

"In Feeling and Form, Susanne Langer writes:

"Non-discursive form in art . . . [articulates] knowledge that cannot be rendered discursively because it concerns experiences which are not formally amenable to the discursive projection. Such experiences are the rhythms of life, organic, emotional and mental, which are not simply periodic but endlessly complex, and sensitive to every sort of influence. All together they combine the dynamic patterns of feeling. It is this pattern that only non-discursive symbolic forms can present and that is the point and purpose of artistic construction.

" . . . every work of art expresses, more or less purely, more or less subtly, not feelings and emotions which the artist has, but feelings and emotions which the artist knows; his insight into the nature of sentience, his picture of vital experience, physical, emotive and fantastic.

"Such knowledge is not expressible in ordinary discourse . . . . [T]he forms of feeling and the forms of discursive expression are logically incommensurate, so that any exact concept of feeling and emotion cannot be projected into the logical form of literal language. Verbal statement, which is our normal and most reliable means of communication, is almost useless for conveying knowledge about the precise character of the affective life."