"Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier"
About this Quote
Bogan is needling a seductive modern mistake: treating language like a delivery truck and ideas like parcels. Her phrasing is deceptively mild - “it is easy to believe” - a soft setup that exposes a hard reduction. The sentence performs what it critiques. It moves cleanly, almost bureaucratically, as if to demonstrate how quickly writing can slide into mere conveyance, stripped of texture, music, and risk. The trap is not stupidity; it is plausibility. In an age that prizes clarity, speed, and utility, it feels responsible to make words disappear behind their “content.”
The subtext is a poet’s refusal of that bargain. For Bogan, language isn’t just the vessel; it’s part of the thought itself, shaping what can be imagined and what cannot. The line hints at the difference between information and experience: an “idea” can be summarized, but a poem’s force often lives in cadence, pressure, ambiguity, and the charged friction between words. When you insist language be “very little else,” you demand it behave like a transparent window; Bogan is reminding us it’s also stained glass, distortion, weather.
Context matters: Bogan wrote amid the early-to-mid 20th century’s wars between plain style, high modernism, and the growing authority of mass communication. Her skepticism reads now like a preemptive critique of our own content economy, where writing is optimized for transmission, not transformation. The line isn’t anti-clarity; it’s anti-thinning. It warns that when language is only a carrier, our ideas arrive intact but bloodless.
The subtext is a poet’s refusal of that bargain. For Bogan, language isn’t just the vessel; it’s part of the thought itself, shaping what can be imagined and what cannot. The line hints at the difference between information and experience: an “idea” can be summarized, but a poem’s force often lives in cadence, pressure, ambiguity, and the charged friction between words. When you insist language be “very little else,” you demand it behave like a transparent window; Bogan is reminding us it’s also stained glass, distortion, weather.
Context matters: Bogan wrote amid the early-to-mid 20th century’s wars between plain style, high modernism, and the growing authority of mass communication. Her skepticism reads now like a preemptive critique of our own content economy, where writing is optimized for transmission, not transformation. The line isn’t anti-clarity; it’s anti-thinning. It warns that when language is only a carrier, our ideas arrive intact but bloodless.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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