Excerpts: Poetry and Language

...poets from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson through Adrienne Rich, Charles Wright, Mary Oliver, and Louise Gluck have thought about the nature of their art, expecially in terms of language as a kind of echo-chamber in which the origins of words (often lost over time) enhance their current denotations and connotations. Often unconsciously, the root meanings of words add resonance and meaning to the language of the poem.

__ Jay Parini, Why Poetry Matters, 2008, Yale University Press, p. x

 

It had been recognized for centuries, by Galileo, for example, that the crucial aspect of language is discrete infinity---the capacity to create arbitrary structures of arbitrary complexity by putting together discrete items, which is rather unusual in the biological world.

Noam Chomsky, 2000 in Jay Parini, 2008. p. 30.

...there are only so many words; yet from these relatively few words one can create (as poets do) an endless variety of nuanced meanings.

Jay Parini, 2008, pp. 16-17.

Words are signs of natural facts.

Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.

Nature is the symbol of spirit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature" in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). Taken from Jay Parini, 2008, p. 36

Emerson plays with the notion that words themselves have buried within them a pictorial content, and that language tends to evolve in the direction of abstractness...... Poets consistently attempt to return words to their original sense. pictorial, concrete, and metaphorical associations.... to refresh lanugage by drawing words back into alignment with their original pictorial, concrete, and metaphorical associations....he rightly observes that the evolution of language from concrete to abstract has moral implications: "The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language."  

Jay Parini, 2008, p. 37, 41

What I responded to [while reading poetry], on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning.

Louise Gluck, 1994, in Jay Parini, 2008, p. 40.