2 Poetic Language
Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase, “he (or she) was just being poetic.” It’s a phrase you wouldn’t be surprised to hear after someone utters some flowery description of a sunrise or a snowstorm. It describes a use of language that is perhaps pretty but also empty, something meaninglessly ornate. It’s an unfortunate use of the word. Authentic poetic language is very different.
We will call “poetic language,” that language which is most closely associated with poetry. It is also called “figurative language.” It is opposed to so-called “literal” language. Understood in the context of actual poetry, poetic language is not nice-sounding words that have no real meaning. Poetic language is the fullest possible language. Poets pack the absolute maximum of meaning (in every sense of the word) into every part of the poem. This does sometimes make poems hard to understand, and that may mislead a hasty person to think there is nothing to understand. In other words, one of the reasons poetry sometimes seems empty is that it is so full.
It’s important to understand first that poems are not made entirely of what is properly called “poetic” language. Poems don’t use only figurative and never literal language. As we’ve said already: the language of poetry is not essentially different from the language of everyday life. That means two things: it means that everything we do when we use language outside of poem, we also do in poems. It also means that everything we do in poems, we also do in everyday language. All of the “devices” that we properly associate with poetic language are also used regularly in everyday language, spoken or written, and not just by people who have a vast or specialized education or a particular facility with language. “Poetic language” is used by everyone, including you and your three-year old brother. It’s not overstating the case to say that poetry is a part of language itself and that poems are merely the most concentrated expressions of language’s inherent poetry. Poets are more conscious of the poetry already in language and more deliberate in their use of it. Poems heighten or intensify certain ordinary ways of using language. We might say that poems put the emphasis on different aspects of language—including the language we call figurative. But they still don’t do anything that we don’t already do every day when we speak.
And yet poems don’t usually feel like everyday language. Everyday language is usually easy to understand. And poems often are not. Everyday language tends to say exactly what it means—or at least tries to. Poems don’t seem to do that. We come back again to a question we addressed in chapter one: Why don’t poems just say what they mean? We began to answer this question when we said that poems are not merely trying to say something. They are also trying to do (or be) something. But that answer is incomplete. We did not explain how poems use language to do things. We will begin to answer that question h