having engaged some with poetry in workshop settings and as a reader, I've come to think that a part of what makes a good poem is sort of creating a personal language, a microworld of language in which certain words are admissible and certain words are not. you can feel this. sometimes a word is used in a poem and it jangles at you, it feels wrong and awkward and out of place. shoehorned in. but in an elegantly constructed poem, the unexpected arrives with the air of resetting what was previously known and casting it in a new light. “previously known” comes from the other words in the poem and the way they fit with each other. every poet and every poem seems to have a sense of its natural language, and what sounds stilted and stupid in the hands of one poet sounds lovely and fluid in the work of another. which seems to indicate that what matters is not a mastery of many words, but a mastery of few.
