Poetry as a Change in the Language

What we find in each and every poem that speaks the world anew is an enactment of – and simultaneously a model for – the dynamic openness at the heart of all of our symbolic systems. The countervailing force to the depressing conformities all around us is that there are actually no rules to any language, at the point of change. To be sure, systems of censorship exist, and these can contract down to the level of one’s workplace, their friendship network, an intimate partner or, perhaps most cogently, the self. But the strange openings in language that Eagleton praises in Auden’s words will persist through all species of tyranny because they are innate to the ways we refer to new things in the world as we speak. And new things come about all the time. Poetry is that reminder.