Most of us have, I think it’s safe to generalize, little to do with poetry. Between a paragraph of prose and the stanza of a poem, we are likelier to prefer the indicative sentence to the symbolic verse. Poetry is ponderous in a way even the poorly written paragraph is not; it slows us down, and takes us away from our see-it-grab-it-get-it-done habit. Most of all, it’s just not the way we talk.

But thinking about poetry—what it’s after and how it differs from prose—can help us understand and use our everyday writing and thinking more skillfully. By prose we mean the ordinary language we write and speak in our everyday ways of life. The noun prose and the adjective prosaic are related, the latter meaning factual and ordinary and, perhaps not surprisingly, dull and commonplace as well. With prose we say something about something, and to get that done we find a subject and predicate a predicate about it. Philosophy knows this as the great division of experience into S & P, and it is understood to be the cause of our prize human distinction—a rational life.

Traditional understanding has it that prose lies at the far end of a line projecting out from, strangely, silence; that when our sights are set on knowing the truth and not just understanding the facts, we must set aside all our words and phrases and clauses and quiet our mind to discern realities which grammar cannot hold. This is the ancient principle underlying most meditative regimes and philosophico-religious disciplines of any serious standing. Between those two end points of prose and silence, however, lies poetry, with its grammar of a sort: we might find a subject and its predicate, but then again we might not; and if we do, we’re likely to see what might look like a sentence split between lines and not conforming to those rules of usage that prose will violate only at its own risk. Between silence and the everyday lies the world of images, what has been called the interworld, a place neighboring on where we are when we are singing, when we are being carried (note the passive) by perceptions too wild to stay caged in conceptual prose we actively compose. This is why it is said that we should only read poetry aloud, because it nears more easily then the cadence of song.

That imagistic world between silence and today’s day will always remain forbidden to prose because it is situated closer to silence, a world complete and undivided in itself, than to our common world always in action. Poetry doesn’t sound like prose because it is looking through the objects prose only looks at. We look at something—and make grammatical subjects of them—with the body’s eyes, that is to say with our senses. To our sensorial perception, we see things everywhere, and it is just their relationships with one another, whether harmonious or conflictive, that make up the predicates of our sentences. But poetry will go along with this worldview only so far, until it will so twist and turn its nouns and verbs and syntactical structure that we come to see past the retina, so to speak, and find in the commonplace a world of meaning lying behind—or far more deeply within—the objects we otherwise merely superficially sensed.

All this can teach us two lessons about our everyday writing and thinking. Our prose is working at its best when it is precise, because in its workmanlike way, it is seeing exactly this and saying exactly that about all the possible things that make up the waking world where we spend our time. But we learn too that there are animating meanings which cannot be denotated and affirmed, realities which can only be evoked and pointed in the direction of. The poet works to see—and to come to know more directly than the prosaic mind can—what is going on behind the scenes. To the poet’s mind’s eye, like the jester’s at the grave king’s court, the world and its play of life is ironic—anything but what it seems so prosaically to be.

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Lacing, sewing, weaving—all of these are arts which produce a structured fabric of some sort, a textile which stands as a context for both use and significance and the pleasure that attends both. Interestingly, the words textile and context are linguistic twins; both, along with the word text as well (note the –xt combination in all of them) are derived from a Latin verb meaning to weave.

To speak of structure, however, is immediately to imply order, arrangement, and design, an intentional geometry of measurement and shape whose stability allows the changeable to find a place without veering out into formless chaos. From this, an instructive comparison can be made, I think, between some of the dimensions we learn about in geometry—point, line, and plane—and the elements of language—word, phrase, and clause. Both disciplines produce designs and structures, geometry of planes and solids, language of sentences and paragraphs. In both, these stable structures allow the flow of feeling and emotion, like marrow in the bone, to remain focused on the significance they mean to represent. Geometry does so in its dimensionality, language in its ramification.

A geometrical point has no dimension, not having developed yet into length or breadth. It marks only a position in space. Analogously we may say that a word, a noun, only names something in the world, and in that sole capacity is as still and stationary as the geometrical point. The geometer’s line has one dimension, length, and so does the grammarian’s phrase, a group of words related in some way and extended out from one word, as a prepositional phase stretches from a preposition to its object. And it is the geometrical plane that next takes on two dimensions, adding breadth to a line’s length, just as the clause adds a verb to the word, delimiting an idea as it lays out its surface, its predication.

This curious association between geometry and grammar can be seen, surprisingly enough, in the common derivation of the geometrical term parabola and the literary term parable. Both words arise from a Greek verb meaning to throw beside, the common idea being that in putting or placing things beside each other, we can find meaning in their comparison. In the parabola, that bowl-shaped figure we see in the shape of a rainbow or the trajectory of a ball thrown into the air, we can compare and find equal the two sides of the area of the path covered at the axis point between them. Likewise, the purpose (or shape, so to speak) of a parable is to compare the characters and events of a story with philosophical or religious ideas they are meant to represent. Common to both applications is the notion that what is being figured signifies an ideal elsewhere perfect but in its manifestation here only approximate.

And herein lies, perhaps, a connection between geometry and grammar. The elements of point, line, and plane assemble themselves according to reason into solids of all make and manner, such as sphere, cube, and prism. Likewise do the linguistic elements of word, phrase, and clause combine fittingly to build sentences of varying shape: simple, compound, and complex. The geometrical solid is the linguistic assertion; both are configurations whose integrity of construction determines how well they say the meaning they originally intended to communicate. That meaning is ideal; we see it with our mind’s eye. But once we undertake to translate it into materials of stone or wood or words or phrases, we begin the risky work of creation, knowing in our bones that the finite can never pin down, never contain the wild infinite. But therein lies, after all, the play of art, the delight of making things—by design.

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Every art has its procedure, its way of doing business. The art of writing—or call it the art of composition or of thinking—lays out grammar as its way forward, with signposts and guardrails to keep the force of one’s thinking (the old word for it was mentation) accumulating forward. One such critical guide stipulates whether the verb is singular or plural with certain words called indefinite pronouns.

Pronouns are one of the eight parts of speech in the traditional scheme of grammar, and indefinite pronouns are a subclass whose members refer not to a specific antecedent already named (for example, the dog was barking because he was hungry, where the personal pronoun he refers specifically to the antecedent noun dog), but to a more general or, as their title has it, indefinite referent (as in some of the dogs were barking because they were hungry, where the indefinite pronoun some is referring nonspecifically to the generality of dogs in question). This all seems fairly straightforward, and few writers would be tempted to change the number of the verb in either example.

Nor is it likely that we would change the verb in this example: Some of these angry dogs are fit to be tied because some of this food is rotten. Why is the verb plural (are) in the first clause but singular (is) in the second? Notice in these examples that between the indefinite pronouns and their respective verbs lies a prepositional phrase (of these angry dogs and of this food). Prepositions make up another one of the eight parts of speech, and they always require an object of some sort (usually a noun or pronoun), the resulting group of words being called a prepositional phrase. The sign we are to watch for, then, is whether the object of the preposition is singular or plural: if the prepositional phrase between an indefinite pronoun and its verb is singular, then the verb is singular (some of this food is); conversely, if the prepositional phrase between an indefinite pronoun and its verb is plural, then the verb is plural (some of these angry dogs are).

This rule of the grammatical road applies to many (but not all) of the indefinite pronouns. All is another indefinite susceptible to this standard guidance, but here we can get a glimpse into why there is such a rule at all. In the sentence all of these cats are sleeping, so all is finally quiet for a while, the first clause poses no problem, because the object of the preposition, cats, is plural, and so the verb, are, is plural. Same rule, same application. But why is the verb of the second clause, is, singular? This instance of the indefinite all is really indefinite, because its antecedent is not one of the unnamed cats, but the entirety of the general situation or circumstance created now (and no doubt thankfully) by the fact that the cats are finally sleeping. The writer is, reasonably enough, expecting readers to read between the lines (that is to say, read closely and insightfully) and supply what can be justifiably assumed to be the meaning intended.

But let’s fly the guardrails and see what happens. If we change the singular is of that second clause to the plural are, the intended meaning is overturned: the indefinite pronoun all in all are finally quiet for a while now refers back to the cats once again, and although that is a logically possible set of affairs, it is a meaning at variance with what the writer had originally wanted to say. A quiet house is one thing, quiet cats quite another. This omission of what is otherwise logically necessary is called ellipsis, a rhetorical figure of speech that is everywhere in English, particularly in diction more casual than formal, that is, occasions where it is reasonable and not self-inflicting to trust the reader with finishing your thought.

Likewise, caution is in order with the pronouns any and none. Both of these begin by following the same rule governing the number of the prepositional object. The verb (are) is plural in any of the dogs in this room are adoptable because the object dogs is plural; and the verb (is) is singular in any of this food is suitable for your dog because the prepositional object food is singular. But if the indefinite any means any one (even if followed by a plural prepositional object), then the verb remains singular: any of the dogs in this room is adoptable, thereby emphasizing the number of singular possibilities (any one of) to choose among. So too with none. When none means no, the verb will be plural: none of the cats in this room are particularly friendly means no cats in this room are particularly friendly. But if none means not one (again particularizing the referent), the verb will be singular: None of these cats is friendly means not one of them is.

As is so often the case, this grammatical guardrail is meant to keep us precise—in thought and in the style in which we express the thought. In both grammar and thinking, the point is to avoid being arbitrary, to possess ourselves from wandering off into the vague and suggestive. These insinuating qualities deceive rather than enlighten, but they can be guarded against by keeping to the ways of the craft.

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To think about language is to think about what it means to think. That cumbersome sentence makes defensible sense, in fact, because language is the means by which we think. We take up language to say something about our experience in the world. We form subjects and predicates, sentences and paragraphs, and in doing so we come to human consciousness, a special kind of attention which objectifies the world and ourselves.

It is important to remind ourselves about this bit of philosophy because it stands as the principle of clear and effective writing. To write well depends upon thinking clearly: making distinctions between this and that, saying this, not that, directing our thoughts to a particular audience with a certain purpose in mind, intent on truth and not merely persuasion. In doing that we are thinking objectively, and we give both others and ourselves some measure of distance from the emotional charge which writing (and speaking) otherwise carelessly amplifies. We can, then, come reasonably to an understanding of things.

In the technics of language, this objectivity is accomplished through the linguistic (and logical) device of subject and predicate. The subject names that which the clause intends to say something about, and the predicate, which includes the verb, is the announcement of what the writer wishes to say. This two-headed creation of subject and predicate is the snake in the garden, though, because the distinction it demands we make between agent and action is responsible for both the glory and gore of our human experience. To think in this objectifying way is inescapably to think about things. Even more than that, it is to think things, to make the world into a collection of things, one acting on another. The subject-predicate trick is how we conceptualize. With it we produce a world of mental objects, giving ourselves the distance we need (good or bad) to assume a certain position and take a certain action. Everything’s a thing.

We can see how language works like this most readily in what are called transitive verbs, verbs which require a direct object, which by definition cannot be the same thing as the subject of the verb. For example, in the sentence her friend translated her novel into German, the writer wants to say something about her friend—not about her, not about her novel, not about the German language. We know this because only her friend is the subject of the sentence. The assertion which the writer then makes about her friend is what constitutes the predicate, which centers on the transitive verb translated and its direct object novel. This predicate is then completed by the remaining phrase into German.

And with that we have an otherwise simple and undivided experience sliced and diced and minced and mulched into subject and verb, direct object and complement—all accomplished by and undertaken for the rise of our human consciousness. This is why precision is said to be the heart of style: the more exact we are, the sharper are the images with which we think and write. And the sharper our images, the clearer-cut are our mental objects, which can then act burr-like to catch and bind a reader’s attention. It is no coincidence that the words think and thing are conceptually related. A thing meant originally a pubic or deliberative assembly, where thinking, or deliberation, took place. To think, then, is to see our human experiences as made up of things, one objective reality in some relation to another with a certain effect and consequence.

What’s odd about this propensity of language to make the world into a container of things, however, is that this doesn’t happen with a verb we use countless times every day: the verb to be. In the sentence my friend is a novelist, it may appear that there are two things in the universe of that statement, friend and novelist, but that, it ends up, is a illusion of our conceptualizing, because the verb is (as used here) does not intend to express action on a direct object (as was the case with translated her novel), but rather to predicate an identity between the two things named. Converted into a arithmetical equation, it would be expressed friend = novelist. Verbs that work like this are called copulas, and instead of denoting an action, they assert a state of being: my friend is a novelist ultimately means my friend is in a state of being a novelist. To distinguish things, in other words, is not necessarily to objectify and divide them.

And, finally, midway between the transitive and copula is the intransitive verb, which expresses action without aiming it directly at anything: my friend writes every morning. There we have action, but the subject is not seen to be writing something, just writing every morning. Here the world portrayed is filled with fewer things, and so the reader’s attention is corralled into staying with the action alone, not with the product or result of it. Understanding this allows us now to appreciate a peculiarity of the verb to be, which we earlier noted was a copula, linking or identifying subject with some noun in the predicate. But when there is no noun in the predicate of that verb, as, for example, in the sentence my friend is here, we must understand the verb is to be asserting existence, not identity, which defines it no longer as a copula, but as an intransitive.

All of which points to an interesting observation. These distinctions of kind into which we classify verbs have an importance beyond the academic niceties of wordsmithery. All three—transitive, copula, and intransitive—produce in their respective subjects and predicates the clarifying consciousness we so prize as human beings, but we should distinguish, as do the poets, between consciousness and awareness. To be aware is a matter of insight—not just seeing, but seeing into or seeing through the things which comprise our objective experience. In awareness, something is understood to be behind the factual reality out there. Just what that is, however, it is not possible for language to say.

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The English author, poet, and poet laureate Ted Hughes was, as well, a writer of children’s literature, and in the foreword to Children as Writers 2, a collection of prize-winning pieces in a children’s literary competition run in 1975 by the Daily Mirror newspaper, he made some observations which can only help us adults understand better what makes for writing that is alive and pulsing:

Children’s sensibility, and children’s writing, have much to teach adults. Something in the way of a corrective, a reminder. Theirs is not just a miniature world of naïve novelties and limited reality—it is also still very much the naked process of apprehension, far less conditioned than ours, far more fluid and alert, far closer to the real laws of its real nature. It is a new beginning, coming to circumstances afresh…. Preconceptions are already pressing, but they have not yet closed down, like a space helmet, over the entire head and face, with the proved, established adjustments of security. Losing that sort of exposed nakedness, we gain in confidence and in mechanical efficiency on our chosen front, but we lose in real intelligence. We lose in readiness to change, in curiosity, in perception, in the original, wild, no-holds-barred approach to problems.

These remarks struck my attention because it can be difficult as adults—elementally difficult—to come upon “circumstances afresh,” as Hughes puts it, and to realize that our many complaints in struggling to write more fluently might have a lot to do with how far we have traveled, and necessarily so, from a child’s “naked apprehension” of that same world in which both they and we live and move and have our being. What we oppose to their “exposed nakedness” is our sophisticated conceptualizing, that ever down-pulling, fixing tendency which is part of us now because our language is set up to name things, and so with every noun we fasten tight a world that is in truth ever on the run. Alert, the child’s mind moves with the moving and hits the mark by sighting the center; distracted, our mind freezes and loses that moving focal point, to talk of what’s off the center.

We can see this opposition between action and things, center and perimeter, in many of the sentences we write casually and only occasionally revise. What, for example, might be the difference between he expressed his doubt about the likelihood of the project’s success and he doubted the project would succeed? Or between the company experienced significant loss in revenue and the company lost significant revenue? The first of each is misfocused and inflated: is it really his expressing something that we want to point to, or that he doubted? Is it that the company experienced something, or that the company lost significant revenue?

A child’s mind wants to know what’s really going on, not an idea about what’s going on. That “more fluid and alert” apprehension Hughes is talking about answers why the second version of each of these examples is the better one: without that space helmet covering its head and face—the central site of our five senses, remember—the childlike mind perceives and then states, rather than conceptualizing, as we adults habitually do: we too perceive an image, but then we look around it and state what is peripheral, not central, to it.

All this, though, might amount to a counsel of perfection, and perfection is not, we are thankful, ever possible. We will improve our prose in real measure, though, if we can use Hughes’s insights about the childlike vision of things to change our tendency and to make clear for us again the direction of our unreachable goal, because it is in a right striving that we will better our work. And that striving means to see and say—that’s all. A child’s intelligence, which we should properly distinguish from an adult’s reason, can still sustain the undeflected power of the image, facing it in a direct line of approach and capture without being distracted by related but lesser goings-on. That is why precision is said to be at the heart of one’s literary style—because a fine style sees and says the heart of the matter.

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