"Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words"
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Engle treats poetry less like a mystical gift and more like a high-powered engineering problem: take the plain stuff of speech and run it through an amplifier until it exceeds its normal limits. “Ordinary language raised to the Nth power” borrows the cool authority of math to puncture the incense-cloud stereotype of verse. The subtext is a defense of craft. Poetry isn’t special because it floats above everyday talk; it’s special because it metabolizes the everyday into intensity, compression, and charge.
Then he pivots into anatomy. “Boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions” is a deliberately physical metaphor that insists poems have structure and sensation at once. Bones imply argument, form, and underlying logic; nerves and blood insist on vulnerability, urgency, and felt experience. Engle is quietly rejecting the false choice between the “head” poem and the “heart” poem. He’s arguing for an integrated organism: thought gives the poem its posture, feeling gives it its reflexes.
The final image is the most revealing: “the delicate, tough skin of words.” Skin is both protection and contact; it’s where we meet the world, and where we bruise. Engle’s intent is to remind writers that diction isn’t decoration - it’s the membrane that holds everything in and makes everything readable. In mid-century American letters, with New Criticism’s attention to the text and a rising workshop culture, this reads like a manifesto for the page: poetry as a disciplined body, alive only when language is precise enough to withstand pressure.
Then he pivots into anatomy. “Boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions” is a deliberately physical metaphor that insists poems have structure and sensation at once. Bones imply argument, form, and underlying logic; nerves and blood insist on vulnerability, urgency, and felt experience. Engle is quietly rejecting the false choice between the “head” poem and the “heart” poem. He’s arguing for an integrated organism: thought gives the poem its posture, feeling gives it its reflexes.
The final image is the most revealing: “the delicate, tough skin of words.” Skin is both protection and contact; it’s where we meet the world, and where we bruise. Engle’s intent is to remind writers that diction isn’t decoration - it’s the membrane that holds everything in and makes everything readable. In mid-century American letters, with New Criticism’s attention to the text and a rising workshop culture, this reads like a manifesto for the page: poetry as a disciplined body, alive only when language is precise enough to withstand pressure.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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