How did we decide to call a tree “tree”? A bird “bird”? Not now, but in the early days, when there could have been different ways to name or define something.
I imagine it was messy at first. People pointed, made noises, copied each other, corrected each other, and slowly converged to something. Different groups might have had different oral representations, in this context, words, for the color blue, and over time, those differences narrowed, through contact and habit, until a few names survived. Then we learned another trick. Instead of making a new word for everything, we started combining words. We built grammar. We discovered that a small set of sounds could be arranged to carry much more than any single label. But how long did it take us to find a way to carry our feelings into materialized words, the first time we tried to express fear, a thought, a doubt?
Language may have become possible by reducing the space of possibilities around a subject of interest. We agree on forms to reduce noise. We make things clearer by making them less vague. That is how we can finally have a conversation. Words give shape to what would otherwise stay obscure. For objects, it is straightforward. For concepts, it is harder, but we still do it.
Meaning is personal. We use the exact words, but we are rarely talking about the same thing. A tree is a woody plant for most people, but for one, it might be a pine in the dark, and for the other, an apple tree near home. Words never travel light; every time one appears, it drags a pile of private assumptions or attributes behind it. When Western philosophers wrote “man,” they were most likely thinking of white men, more or less their own reflection, and then calling it universal. And when my friend Jane says, “I’m looking for a guy with a genuine heart who makes me laugh,” she means someone she finds attractive, socially acceptable, financially sorted, emotionally safe, and amusing in a very specific, non-threatening way.
We pretend we share meanings and unconsciously ignore how much extra baggage each word is smuggling in. Yet, most of the time, we get by because language has settled. Not because it is perfect, but because it is stable enough. Words become shared habits. They are used almost the same way across a community, which makes conversation possible. But it also does something else. Over time, words get trapped in their usual meanings. They stop feeling like choices and start feeling like nature. Over centuries, a word becomes a well-worn path: efficient, familiar, and increasingly difficult to leave. We forget that each word is vague until we decide not to treat it as vague. We treat the path as the landscape.
This is where poetry matters.
A poet enlarges the space of possibility inside words, and hence introduces a larger universe to us. In ordinary life, every word masks something. It hides the richness of what it points to, because it must be usable quickly. Grammar, too, can become a kind of mask: not only arranging meaning, but constraining it, forcing thought into customary channels. Some notions remain pressed against the back wall of what is sayable, suffocated by routine phrasing.
Poetry resists this settling. It stretches a word beyond its standard use, defamiliarizes it, and lets it touch unexpected neighbors. It does not merely describe; it makes things appear again, as if for the first time. That is why a poem is rarely transparent on first reading. It is not only that the reader is slow; it is that the language has been reshaped. The poem asks you to inhabit words differently. Whether a poem is long or short does not matter; what matters is that it changes the universe you thought those words lived in.
This is also why “reasonable” comparisons can be a trap when reading poetry. A comparison can be correct and still dead in a poem. The metaphors that truly wake us often feel strange, even a bit absurd at first. They provoke the imagination. They do not merely carry meaning; they multiply it. In that sense, the poem behaves as any artwork may do: it signifies beyond a single paraphrase, yet it remains tightly held by form, so that the reader is guided rather than lost. That’s why “the truest poetry is the most feigning”.
At the same time, once a poetic move becomes familiar, it loses force, because it becomes part of the common language!
A metaphor that once surprised can become a button we press automatically. The first person to liken a woman’s cheeks to a rose, or her long black hair to the longest winter night, may be a poet; the thousandth is usually only repeating, so even if it is beautiful, it is no longer poetry. When someone says, “Your lips are a glass of wine to me,” simply because it is the kind of thing one says, language is no longer discovery; it is habit. In that moment, the speaker is borrowing another person’s bag of words. Hence, the common language.
This is not only an aesthetic failure; it is a failure of attention and sincerity. Prefabricated phrases allow us to speak without thinking. Worse, they allow us to feel without fully feeling, because the emotion arrives already packaged by culture. A worn-out metaphor is not merely unoriginal; it can be a way of outsourcing experience. To be a poet, and, in a deeper sense, to be a lover or a thinker, I believe we must see and say for ourselves. Repeating another’s vision is not seeing. It is sleepwalking through language.
Poetry introduces new worlds by changing not only meanings but the kinds of explanations we permit.
In poems, we can attribute human emotion to nature. The wind “wants,” the sea “remembers,” the night “refuses.” This can happen without any claim of literal causation. Poetry permits a rhetorical because, knowingly untrue in the scientific sense, but emotionally or aesthetically satisfying. The laurel exists because Daphne fled Apollo. The nightingale sings because it mourns. These are not causes; they are invented reasons, poetic ones. They do not explain the world as it is; they create a world that could be, a universe where feeling is a principle of order.
In this sense, poetry is not merely language with ornaments. It is language stretching its own rules and opening a new field of meaning, one that cannot be reduced to definitions alone. By the same logic, the poetic can arise in any human endeavor. This is why Tarkovsky’s cinema is often called poetic.
Storytelling, though, operates differently.
A story typically does not expand language itself. It uses language as it already exists. Its power lies not in reshaping the meanings of words, but in arranging events into a sequence that can be lived through. In that sense, narrative is closer to scientific modeling than to poetry, in my view! Science abstracts reality into models to understand interactions between particles, people, systems, and to explore what we have not directly observed. A model lets us test possibilities and ask “what if?” with discipline.
Stories do something similar in human terms. They are simulations of life. Through narrative, we rehearse motives, consequences, risk, choice, and regret. We experience situations we may never encounter directly, and we learn patterns of feeling and action without paying the full cost in real life. This is why people reach for stories when trying to explain reality: narratives feel true not because they are factual, but because they model experience in a form we recognize.
So, poetry and storytelling both build worlds, but they do so differently. A story builds a world by sequence, in the language. Poetry builds a world by meaning, by returning words to their openness, and letting language become new again. That is why poetry may be the highest thing the mind has made.
After writing these notes, I realized that Heidegger and L. P. Yakubinsky, separately, have written extensively on closely related themes, often under similar titles. I have not read their work yet, but I am now very curious to see what they have to say.
