‘For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice.’
T S Eliot wrote these words in Little Giddings, from Four Quartets, while the world was in seismic change nearly a century ago.
Arguably, we are now in an even more significant shift, and our current language’s inadequacy is palpable.
The words that dominate our vocabulary feel far too small and hard-edged.
They seem to hem us in rather than breathing life and emotion into our conversations. As a result, we are impoverished, yet maybe we don’t always realise it.
Perhaps this is why we need poetry…