The Liberating Word

“It is equally undesirable to think oneself a poet and to think that one is not a poet. That is something that we never find out.”—Eliot, Letters, 7: 333

“the poet who fears to take the risk that what he writes may turn out not to be poetry at all, is a man who has surely failed, who ought to have adopted some less adventurous vocation.”—Eliot, CP 4: 368

“He that thinks himself capable of astonishing may write blank verse, but those that hope only to please must condescend to rhyme.”—Dr Johnson, “John Milton”

“The verse created like thy theme sublime, / In number, weight, and measure, needs not rhyme.”—Andrew Marvell, “On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost”

“This neglect then of Rhime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar Readers, that it rather is to be esteem’d an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover’d to heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing.”—John Milton, “Introduction” to Paradise Lost (London, 1674)

I wanted to write a poem

that you would understand.

For what good is it to me

If you can’t understand it?

                             But you gotta try hard—

William Carlos Williams, “January Morning,” XV

In “plain American that cats and dogs can read”—Marianne Moore

For to write what you can about the world makes it almost bearable.—Randall Jarrell

Everything we do consists of trying to find the liberating word.

—Wittgenstein in conversation with Schlick

December 17, 2024