Is Poetry a Struggle With the Poverty of Language?
Reading further in Vico, I came across this:
Now the sources of all poetic locution are two: poverty of language and need to explain and be understood.
He seems to be speaking of epic poetry, and in his view that is inferior to prose. It was his belief that early men (in the time of Homer) had not yet developed a prose language. But all of that aside, I find the notion of poetry being a struggle with the poverty of language to be an insightful and useful notion.
For instance, here's John Ashbery in his Girls on the Run: A Poem:
Drink the beautiful tea
before you slop sewage over the horizon, the Principal directed.
OK, it's calm now, but it wasn't two minutes ago. What do you want me to do, said Henry,
I am no longer your serf,
and if I was, I wouldn't do your bidding. That is enough, sir.
You think you can lord it over every last dish of oatmeal
on this planet, Henry said. But wait till my ambition
comes a cropper, whatever that means, or bursts into feathered bloom
and burns on the shore. Then the kiddies dancing sidewise
declared it a treat, and the ice-cream gnomes slurped their last that day.
And here are the opening stanzas of A. R. Ammons's Sphere: The Form of a Motion:
The sexual basis of all things is really apparent
and fools crop up where angels are mere disguises:
a penetrating eye (insight), a penetrating tongue (ah),
a penetrating penis and withal a penetrating mind,
integration's consummation: a com- or intermingling of parts,
heterocosm joyous, opposite motions away and toward
along a common line, the in-depth knowledge (a dilly),
the concentration and projection (firmly energized) and
the ecstasy, the pay off, the play out, the expended
nexus nodding, the flurry, cell spray, finish, the
haploid hungering after the diploid condition: the reconciler
of opposites, commencement, proliferation, ontogeny:
What are these if not examples of writers stretching our language to the limits of expression to explain what they have come to know and to be understood?
8:58:48 PM 
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