“Yes, in one sense language is a code, a cultural system — inevitably conditioned by social, economic, and other objective determinants — for exchanging mutually accepted or conventional news, attitudes, and values. But the poet does not use this code, at least not in his good poems. In them, each word is as if newly invented, its functions created and enforced by the integrated powers of the particular dynamic complex. Composition is transcendent. Language is metaphysical.”

—Hayden Carruth