“By bay bight / the building-wolf* / swallowed up / Ólaf’s body.
Fornjót’s son* / with flaming heat / smelted off / the Swede king’s mail.”

—Snorri Sturluson, ‹Saga of the Ynglings› ch. xlii (v. 26),
«Heimskringla» (Hollander translation)

* Kennings “building-wolf” and “Fornjót’s son” both signify “fire”.

Good kenning is, more than good poetry, evidence of limber mind.

Complex is the human psyche, its impulses no less so. At least as early as Plato, humans have grasped that self is not monad; early thinkers nevertheless presumed that psychic health implies unity. Most often, they recommended the elevation of a particular faculty. The favorite has been Reason. The majority of us today hearken unto this strain or live under the delusion that we do or, at the very least, so pretend. Egalitarian society abides no orthodoxy but Reason.

Some time ago, I arrived at a contrary conclusion: hypertrophy of Reason is not preferable to unrestraint of Appetite or Emotion. I should not like to reduce myself to my Reason. On this point, we should have, I think, much to learn from a revisitation of Jung. So long as we are human, we not only Think, Emote/Feel, and Crave but also Intuit and Sense, Perceive and Judge. Apart from these—and, we must hope, above them—we can Will. Inasmuch as the Will stands apart and above, it enjoys the freedom to elect its course.

Universal precepts of psychology open the door to appreciating each one our own internal complexity. But respecting our share of it is rather a personal journey of perception, reflection, and action. I have the impression that I have devoted too much time of late to reading. This pastime is, of course, special in its capacity to exercise so many of our faculties, but even reading with a critical eye and rapt engagement favors a certain passive analysis at the expense of an active synthesis. This latter finds fullest expression only in “creative” pursuits, the recombination of psychic artifacts to feign as much as possible invention. Invention creates Self. For the sake of my Self, then, between passivity and activity, analysis and synthesis, I should exercise better balance.

Poetic statements […] are formed by feelings of passion and emotion. By contrast, philosophical statements are formed by reflection and reasoning. Philosophical statements approach the truth as they ascend to universality. Poetic statements gain certainty as they descend to particulars.

—Vico, «New Science», book I, section 2, point 53

Everything that the poets sensed in their popular wisdom was later understood by the philosophers in their esoteric wisdom. We may say, then, that the poets were the sense of mankind, and the philosophers its intellect.

—idem, book II, prolegomena, introduction