To what better purpose can a man's energy be devoted, and his talents, than the resuscitation of his country's language?
poetry is where the language is renewed.
Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words.
As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.
In general, I agree with Jacob Grimm and feel that we ought to permit changes and uncontrolled growth in language. Even though that also allows potentially threatening new words to develop, language needs the chance to constantly renew itself.
I don't see how English as we use it in Europe can be revivified. It's like Latin must have been in about A.D. 300, tired and used up. All one can do is press very hard stylistically to make it glow.
The position is: the Gaelic language is no longer the native language; it is dead, yet food is being brought to the graveyard.
It is time for dead languages to be quiet.
I am determined to give the Yiddish language a fighting chance to survive.
All progress in literary style lies in the heroic resolve to cast aside accretions and exuberances, all the conventions of a past age that were once beautiful because alive and are now false because dead.
