Music doesnt say anything in the rhetorical sense.
So even literature, which seems to have a content, should, in the words of Archibald MacLeish, not mean but be, that is have some formal expression, some distillation of experience which transcends content, but moves us because it is of us after all. Of all the poets of our time, and I am most touched by Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, it seems to me that, as I get older, Rilke went the deepest. Without reading Jung, he seems to have intuitively grasped some of the mysteries which Jung sought to describe. I find Rilke still the Everest of modern letters, and I think I will be reading him for the next few decades, for I never feel I have plumbed the depths to which he has gone in seeking to express the inexpressable. Poetry is for me, then, an affair of the heart, not of the head, and its clarities point beyond themselves to some still deeper mystery.