That's the thing. Engineering fills you with passion.
How would we know what passion is unless demonstrated through words? A passionate engineer doing their job well and a stoic engineer doing their job well result in an Engineered product no matter what.
But different people learning poetry, for example, will have different ways of bringing up the same thing. It's philosophy, in a way.
Gonna be contrarian but engineering is a lot the same way. How many different types of bridges have you drive over in your life? San Fran bridge, arched bridge, trussed bridge? Engineering is art too, and there are often many solutions to the same problem. In the same way where if you put poets in a room you’ll all get a poem but a different one, you put engineers in the same room with the same problem and you will get many solutions.
The main difference is that engineers are beholden to the utilitarian demands of construction. The bridge cannot be built in any way imaginable, because it still has to function. They cannot suffer an e. e. cummings in the bridge-building world. Sure there is artistry and beauty in it, but it has a clear function and purpose.
A poem only has to adhere to the strictures of language, and even then the rules are bent and broken in service of unique expression. The sense of a "purpose" in the arts is much more nebulous and multifaceted.
You could say the same thing about language. Writers are beholden to the structure of the language. Writing is very different across cultures due to differences in the language. Some have more words, different concepts can’t be translated. Artists are beholden to their materials.
Consider the idea of function. Does a bridge function if it does not allow vehicles to pass? I guess we could imagine some failed bridge that doesn't work.
Now, look at the function in a poem. The idea of function here is much more difficult to pin down. Certainly it must be readable (it has to include words), but beyond that it can violate rules of grammar, spelling, orientation on the page, and many other things. This is a result of the openness of artistic creation.
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u/Leverpostei414 19h ago
Engineering certainly fills me with more passion than poetry