Art & Creativity Quote by Thomas Harrison

Poetry, Harrison argues, isn’t just an art that uses language; it’s the art that most nakedly exposes language’s capacity to be made new. The line turns “originality” from a brag into a duty: poetry “points” to it the way a compass points north, insisting that the medium’s deepest purpose is not storytelling, not self-expression, not even beauty, but the continual renovation of the words we live inside.

The phrasing does a lot of quiet work. “Points” suggests demonstration rather than declaration, as if poems are evidence in an ongoing case about what language can do. “This originality of language” isn’t treated as a stylistic flourish; it’s framed as something essential, almost ethical. The subtext is a critique of writing that treats language as transparent plumbing. In Harrison’s view, poetry refuses the lie that words are neutral containers. It makes us feel the seams: sound, rhythm, etymology, ambiguity, the charged gap between what we mean and what we can say.

Calling originality poetry’s “essential and abiding concern” also pushes back against the periodic obituary for the form. If poetry matters, it’s because it keeps language from going dead in our mouths, from being flattened into slogan, bureaucracy, algorithmic predictability. Contextually, this fits a modernist-and-after lineage (think Pound’s “make it new,” the formal experiments of Stein, the linguistic skepticism of late 20th-century poetics) that treats linguistic invention as cultural resistance.

Harrison is making a high claim, but it’s strategically narrow: poetry doesn’t have to win the attention economy. It just has to keep proving, line by line, that language can still surprise us.