Somewhere I read one poet’s answer, “You grab a word and pull on it.” With this effort one can extricate the word’s interior depths where it will eventually reach a breaking point where its inner-most essence begins to flow. One can then delve into its meaning. When ,you “pull” on a word it begins to stretch, to stretch-thin eventually; then it will bend or tear or break and that “inner essence” is reached. There, kindred spirits of the poet will be able to say, “Aha!” or “oh boy’ as those interior depths of the “shell” ooze outward and speak. An “evocation” will then occur rather than the mere “denotation” which is how the word strikes the non-poet.

A line from Conrad Aiken comes to me here, “When the Word lies broken, bleeding at our feet,” its chora of nuances can begin to flow. But for one to understand the wisdom emanating, that listener must already have a “petal open” heart that owes to it a parallel “death, burial, and resurrection”… so to speak. To put this in personal terms—my first name is “Lewis” and before I could appreciate and understand poetry “Lewis” had to be “stretched” upon the rack of human experience and humbled with the onset of brokenness or humility. An identity crisis happened into which the ego crashed into disillusionment. Now three decades later, my “ear” for poetry is maturing and I can glean a poem’s essence much better than when I started!

Here is T.S. Eliot’s description of the “inner essence.”

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.
— “Burnt Norton,” 1935