Elizabeth Sewell

 

The Structure of Poetry (1952)
 
Sewell sees language as caught between two competing desires:
 

1) The desire to say more, to include more in our utterance, to speak profound, universal, and overwhelming truths. To do that, we have to broaden our language so that it can accommodate everything we try to put into it. However, the problem is that the more we try to include, the more disordered — even chaotic — our language becomes.
 
2) The desire to be clearer, more precise, more specific, and more rational — to say something that cannot be misunderstood, that has the purity of mathematical or logical formulae. However, the problem is that the more ordered we want our language to be, the more we must leave out and the closer we come to falling silent entirely.