Is Poetry ‘a Little Word Machine’?

Is Poetry ‘a Little Word Machine’?
Cropped view of "Calliope, Muse of Epic Poetry," 1798, by Charles Meynier. Public Domain
James Sale
Updated:

A famous definition of poetry as “a little word machine” has been quite extensively and approvingly quoted in the last few decades. There are various versions of the expression. William Carlos Williams spoke of “a small (or large) machine made of words.” Typing the phrase into Google gave me 530,000,000 hits. A short-lived poetry magazine in Birmingham (U.K.) even used the phrase as its title.

The definition is plausible, isn’t it? After all, isn’t that exactly what a poem is? In one sense, yes, it is. It is a “little word machine,” and it might be argued that in the case of long poems, like epics, they are “large word machines.”

James Sale
James Sale
Author
James Sale has had over 50 books published, most recently, “Mapping Motivation for Top Performing Teams” (Routledge, 2021). He has been nominated for the 2022 poetry Pushcart Prize, and won first prize in The Society of Classical Poets 2017 annual competition, performing in New York in 2019. His most recent poetry collection is “StairWell.” For more information about the author, and about his Dante project, visit EnglishCantos.home.blog
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