The subtle body

Reading back through some essays by Denise Levertov, I'm struck by the similarity between her treatment of the "organic form" of a poem (more on that in a second) and the Rudolf Steiner/Goethean science notion of the subtle body underlying living things. There may be some connection with Native American spiritualities and Romantic intuitions as well. If I could make a feeble attempt at explaining, cutting a middle way between essentialism - that is, we perceive the world as it is, things have inherent substance that is perceivable, and constructivism, things aren't much there at all, the world is a big silver screen onto which our minds actively project objects, people, etc. This way of seeing and perceiving has developed over time (Barfield) and has not always been exactly as it is now, and has something to do with the link between language and consciousness. Enter the subtle body, a kind of spiritual underbody. This may be the underlying aspect of a given oject (does it have to be "alive" to have a subtle body? That is plant, mineral, animal? I don't know) which interacts with our minds, co-creating the perception, mingling with underlying reality to create that which we perceive in everyday life. So, too, Levertov claims, there is a poem beneath the poem, an "organic form," which she defines thusly:

"a method of apperception, i.e. of recognizing what we perceive, and is based on an intuition of an order, a form beyond forms, in which forms partake, and of which man's creative works are analogies, resemblances, natural allegories. Such poetry is exploratory."

She traces this in some poems by William carlos Williams, recognizing underlying patterns in meter and sound, calling it a kind of "pulse" of the poem. I like this idea that poetry mirrors creation (poeisis) in this way. The physical artifact or poem has an underlying, spiritual form manifest in the object or poem itself. I'm putting this in dialogue with the idea put forth in the Morton lectures and elsewhere about a "materialist theory of reading" that is, information is energy, to read a poem, to give it voice is to release that energy in soundwaves, to release its body and texture. I'm wondering also if ideas themselves have substance, energy, materiality, or if ideas or words on the page are merely potential energy, so to speak, and only have materiality when spoken aloud. Speaking with a friend steeped in mystical traditions, he mentioned the idea of the subtle body, and that one theory of ancient medicine is that, rather than some antiquated trial and error, ancient shamans could see the subtle bodies of certain plants in trancelike states (after, say, a vision quest) and could identify their healing properties in that vision state, idetifying which were curative and which were poisonous. What does this mean for my own poems? Do they have underlying pattern, how do I become more sensitized to it? I'm sort of a hack at this point when it comes to mechanics and might say of my work what Levertov says of Williams, that at time he he "gives inadequate attention to detail, fails to follow all the way through, as if he were in too much haste to get on to the next matter." I find poetry a way of getting closer to the ground, potentially of sifting through minerals, of touching reality on the ground floor, whereas most of the time we hover in some middle distance, some toposphere, where the terms we traffic in are vague and general. A good poem gives evidence of spiritual expansiveness, of an enlargened consciousness. The problem is it takes time, patience, and sensitivity. It takes work. It takes a state of awareness that culture is at pains to quash. Soooo, fight the good fight?