This is a great article in the New York Times from 2012. It’s a close look at language and how it works in our culture and in poetry.

Here is an enticing excerpt or you can go straight to this great article.

Here’s one striking puzzle: We speak and write with remarkably different aims.  We sometimes try to get clear on the facts, so we can reach agreement on how things are.  But we sometimes try to express ourselves so we can capture the uniqueness of our viewpoint and experiences.  It is the same for listeners: language lets us learn the answers to practical questions, but it also opens us up to novel insights and perspectives.  Simply put, language straddles the chasm between science and art.