Somewhere in the last decade we quietly agreed to become the authors of ourselves. Curate the feed, compose the story, choose the aesthetic, and let life arrange itself around the image. To live poetically, in this telling, means to make of your one existence a beautiful and deliberate thing, a poem you write and the world admires. It is a seductive project. It is also, Kierkegaard would say, a very old form of despair wearing new clothes.

He knew the type. The aesthete, in his book Either/Or, is the man who lives poetically in exactly this sense, hovering above his own life inside the realm of the possible, arranging moods and moments so that nothing quite lands, so that he can avoid being merely and actually himself. The poem he writes is a place to hide. It is lovely from the outside and airless from within, because a self you author entirely is a self with no one to answer to, and a self with no one to answer to turns out to be no self at all, only a performance with an audience of one.

There is another way to hear the phrase, and it comes from a poet who lost his mind reaching for it. Poetically man dwells, wrote Hölderlin, and Heidegger spent an essay turning the line over like a stone. To dwell poetically is not to decorate or fix existence but to inhabit it, to take the measure of a life you did not set, under a sky you did not raise, on ground given rather than made. Dwelling is humbler than authoring. It receives.

And here the Gospel says something the aesthete cannot afford to hear. As Paul tells the Ephesians, we are God’s poíēma (ποίημα): his workmanship, his poem. We are not the poets but the poetry. The kind of living poetically that saves rather than suffocates is not the frantic composition of a self but the slow discovery that you are already being composed, written by a hand more patient and bolder than your own, into a whole you are in no position yet to read.

This changes what we do with the tragic lines. The one who authors himself has to edit them out, crop them, reframe them, because they spoil the image. But if the poem is not mine, if I am a single stanza in something larger, then even the broken meter belongs. The grief has a place in the composition. The wound is not a flaw in the draft to be deleted before anyone sees it; it may be the very turn on which the whole thing rhymes. I cannot see that from inside the line I am living. I have to trust the Poet. Even Christ’s resurrected, glorified body had scars, and they were, in fact, proof of who he was and his present glory.

So I am learning to hold the phrase differently than I once did. To live poetically is not to make my life into a poem worth showing. It is to let my life be a poem worth trusting, wondrous and tragic both, whose Author came, in the fullness of time, to write himself into the story he was telling, and to make the ending good.

That is not a project I can complete. It is a mercy I can receive. And most days, that is enough to go on.

Juan Climacus