Language and Politics and its effect on Poetry

I stood like a deer in headlights while reading the first few paragraphs of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” Understanding what is being stated was not the problem, the problem arrived when attempting to understand it’s connection to poetry. For several paragraphs, there was a large emphasis on the general decadence of our political system and how the failing of our political system is transmitting the same decadence to our English language.

Orwell lived during a very disruptive age, several wars, the holocaust, Watergate, etc. and his weariness  of what was being said by the world’s governments shows through his work. The government’s attempts to placate meaning to the audience, he states, has now transferred into the non-political arena and has made the English language “slovenish” and “makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

I did not understand the paper’s connection to poetry until the second page when Orwell writes “As soon as certain toopics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed.” The concrete from abstract is what creates poetry. 

I believe poetry is a type of prose that connects inanimate and intangible characteristics, qualities, and ideas into tangible or achievable feelings while conveying some meaning thorugh the diction, the syntax, and the speech patterns. In reversal of what Orwell’s states as “bad language,” poetry tries to convert the abstract into the concrete.

“Politics and the English Language” is about the necessity of each individual to make sure there is meaning in what they write. The cause of the destruction of society is not the rampant writings and speeches that seek only to vaguely inform its audience, but those that continually produce the writing.

 I do not agree to some aspects of what Orwell writes. To some extent Orwell is seen as angrier about the situation then trying to state a solution, but even in spirited fervor, Orwell makes a good point about how orthodox politics is used to create vagueness and disillusionment.

This paper can be seen as what poetry should not be.