A Quote by Thomas B. Macaulay
Language is the machine of the poet.
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The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.
There is this tendency to think that if you could only find the magic way, then you could become a poet. "Tell me how to become a poet. Tell me what to do." . . . What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things, and an ability to deal with important unconscious material. When all these things come together, you're a poet. But there isn't one little gimmick that makes you a poet. There isn't any formula for it.
Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.
If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.
Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within.
Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
The body is a very low level machine language. The language of the soul, of the mind, is much more evolved.
One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.
Metaphors, similes, puns - all manner of metonymy - I'm interested in language that cannot be parsed by a machine - language that can only be understood through acculturation.
The writer, the poet, the novelist, are all creators. This does not mean that they invent language; it means that they use language to create beauty, ideas, images. This is why we cannot do without them.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are already trustless - any machine can accept it from any other, securely. They are (nearly) free. They are global - no central bank required, and any machine can speak the language.
Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.
If all individuals were conditioned to machine efficiency in the performance of their duties there would have to be at least one person outside the machine to give the necessary orders; if the machine absorbed or eliminated all those outside the machine, the machine will slow down and stop forever.
[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.
As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.
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