Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

In his essay ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, T S Eliot writes:

It is supposed that the poet, if anybody, is one engaged in perpetual pursuit of the right word. My own experience would be more accurately described as the attempt to avoid the wrong word. For as to the right word, I am not convinced it is anything but a mirage.

‘The wrong word’ presents itself at every turn. ‘Words fail’, but still they come. In The Dean’s December, Saul Bellow evokes Rilke’s refusing to speak of the war,

Not just because the present was too brutal and too formless to be talked about, but because you could only talk about it in newspaper expressions. When you did that, you felt disgust and horror at your own mouth.

But we cannot abjure speech, either on a private or a public level. We have to say something. Often this imperative is said to be the spring of poetry, that poetry essentially is a kind of outburst of expression, a liberation of utterance. But, however ‘free’, verse is formal, even ceremonious to a large degree, though it is forever struggling, or pretending to struggle, against this formality. This is an essential struggle because it is a contention between that longed-for liberated, perfectly communicated, utterance, and the pre-existing limitations of language. The ‘restrictions’ of verse, its rhythms, its metres, the accidence of rhymes, its shapes, wordplay, its allusions, its acceptance of itself as a genre, constitutes to make some meaning in words that are not wholly wrong, are not so given as to provoke only disgust at your own mouth. This tension provides the reason why we traditionally look to some kind of verse form for utterances we know to have special significance. The form, like the ceremony, holds the feeling. The absolute, right word may be a mirage, but poetry always knows this, that it is, as Yeats said, ‘the speech of a man.’