Poverty and Abundance: How the Birth of Language Shaped the Boundaries and Absences of Poetry

School of Literature, Guangxi University of Foreign Languages, 530222 Guangxi, China

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Abstract

The advent of language marked both a catastrophic rupture from immediate experience and the foundation of human civilization, creating an inherent tension between linguistic limitation and expressive aspiration. This study examines how the fundamental poverty of language — its symbolic arbitrariness, linear constraints, and social regulation — paradoxically becomes the generative source of poetic abundance and aesthetic transcendence. Through theoretical analysis drawing on semiotics, phenomenology, and literary criticism, this research investigates the mechanisms by which poets transform linguistic deficiency into creative opportunity, examining works by Hai Zi, Zang Di, Emily Dickinson, and others alongside theoretical frameworks from Adorno, Saussure, and Foucault. The analysis reveals that poetry’s power emerges precisely from language’s failures: metaphorical displacement breaks logical chains, silence and blank space activate reader co-construction of meaning, rhythmic disruption transcends linear temporality, and grammatical reconstruction liberates semantic potential. Poetry exists not as a supplement to language but as its productive contradiction—a continuous refutation of linguistic fatalism that explores the depths of human consciousness at the boundaries where language encounters its own impossibility, suggesting new possibilities for poetic expression in the digital age.