![]() ![]() Poets are more conscious of the poetry already in language and more deliberate in their use of it. 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. ![]() “Poetic language” is used by everyone, including you and your three-year old brother. 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. It also means that everything we do in poems, we also do in everyday language. That means two things: it means that everything we do when we use language outside of poem, we also do in poems. As we’ve said already: the language of poetry is not essentially different from the language of everyday life. Poems don’t use only figurative and never literal language. It’s important to understand first that poems are not made entirely of what is properly called “poetic” language. In other words, one of the reasons poetry sometimes seems empty is that it is so full. This does sometimes make poems hard to understand, and that may mislead a hasty person to think there is nothing to understand. Poets pack the absolute maximum of meaning (in every sense of the word) into every part of the poem. Poetic language is the fullest possible language. Understood in the context of actual poetry, poetic language is not nice-sounding words that have no real meaning. ![]() It is also called “figurative language.” It is opposed to so-called “literal” language. We will call “poetic language,” that language which is most closely associated with poetry. Authentic poetic language is very different. It describes a use of language that is perhaps pretty but also empty, something meaninglessly ornate. 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. ![]()
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