I think "poetry" and "distance" are not a whole, and poetry is not an adjective that modifies distance. They are parallel, that is to say, "poetry" and "distance" have their own meanings. But since they can be juxtaposed and bring us similar feelings, they must have similar symbolic meanings. Tracing back to the source, it is found that the tension between the two lies in the distance.
Poetry is an expression that keeps an aesthetic distance from real life.
We love poetry, because poetry can sometimes give us a scene without language, provide one or two gripping sentences, and let us echo the ancients thousands of years ago in a certain situation. The empathy that travels through time in similar space will make us intoxicated.
When you miss your distant relatives on a full moon night, no matter what your educational level is, you can casually sigh, "Looking up, I found it was moonlight, and then sinking, I suddenly remembered home";
When you are frustrated in your career and depressed, you can also say loudly while drinking, "Since God has given talents, let them find jobs!"! , spin a thousand silver, all come back! " ;
When your heart belongs to a person, but you are troubled by ambiguity, and you say from a distance, "Through the spring wine, while it warms me, I will remind you how to bet and tell Cao to light the candle at a red light", people who understand will naturally understand.
Why are the scenes written and sung by poets still applicable to our lives after thousands of years? This is not to say that all poets have foresight, but that despite thousands of years, human beings still have similar feelings and emotions about many of the same things. Poetry can arouse our singing and intoxication more than vernacular expression. Because of the rhetorical skills such as inversion, metaphor and rhyme in poetic language, it forms a different expression from oral English in real life.
Thinking is inseparable from language, and we can't imagine something in our minds that can't be expressed in words at all. As a language expression, poetry is a brand-new language system for our daily life. It creates a brand-new thinking space, which allows us to temporarily escape from trivial daily life, abandon vulgar self and enter an aesthetic space established by scholars for thousands of years.
Therefore, the significance of poetry in life lies in the brand-new thinking space brought by different language systems, which gives us a chance to breathe when we are tired of secular things. This unique language has opened the distance from reality, so it has produced beauty.