Great Regulars: Words aren't just conceptual.

They're also vibrations that emerge from the human mouth. Leaving poetry aside, the different sentence rhythms of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, the different consonant patterns of Jane Austen and Samuel Johnson, are in part bodily matters. If you imagine yourself saying the sentences of such different writers out loud, the physical sensation is different. The sentences in which [Tim] Parks describes his (former) terrible posture or his (dispelled) urinary problems have sounds and cadences different from those someone else might compose. Yet Parks insists that words are purely cerebral, quite removed from the body.

from Robert Pinsky: The New York Times: Curing the Pelvic Headache

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"Lines Written During a Period of Insanity," possibly [William] Cowper's best-known poem, delivers tremendous force, rooted, for me, in the self-contradiction of its energetic hopelessness: If the narrator's predicament is so absolute and unrelievable, how can he describe it with such explosive intellectual strength? Some readers may find something like a wit stripped of laughter (or is it just bitter laughter?) in the poem's final contrast with Abiram, who in the biblical story of punishment was swallowed up into the pit while still alive.

from Robert Pinsky: Slate: Damned Great

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