The life of the language

The life of the language is Christabel LaMotte’s name for poetry’s distinctive purpose: not reforming the world, but giving voice to language in its own living, changing movement. In Randolph Henry Ash’s recollection of their first conversation, the phrase marks the instant LaMotte moves from courteous reticence into a confident declaration of what poetry can do.

The Phrase and Its Meaning

In a letter to Ash, LaMotte distinguishes the poet from the novelist by the work each is understood to serve. Poets write for the life of language; novelists, she says, write for the betterment of the world. She describes her own poems as arising not from the lyric impulse but from a restless, many-sided, observant, analytic, and curious mind—one she associates with Balzac. The contrast does not reduce poetry to sound alone: it makes language itself, rather than an external program of social improvement, the poet’s central concern.

LaMotte also resists a conventional account of women’s poetic inspiration. She argues that the young woman who appears to inspire lyric verse may instead be made subordinate to the poem: the poems are not for the young lady; the young lady is for the poems. Her formulation exposes the cost of turning a woman into a poetic ideal, while her account of her own work stresses observation and intellectual variety rather than passive inspiration.

Ash’s Recollection of LaMotte

Ash returns to the phrase while asking LaMotte about her intended poem on Melusina. He recalls that their conversation began with ordinary questions about whether she would use Spenserian stanzas, blank verse, or another metre. LaMotte then spoke with feeling about verse and the life of language; in Ash’s memory, she stopped seeming shy or apologetic and looked magnificent. He presents that moment as one he will not readily forget.

The phrase is therefore both an aesthetic claim and a remembered encounter. Ash does not merely repeat LaMotte’s idea: he recalls the change in her bearing when she expressed it, making her account of poetic purpose inseparable from her emergence as a forceful speaker. His letter’s attention to her face and manner shows how the idea became part of his personal memory of her.

Language, Poetry, and Their Wider Reach

Ash connects LaMotte’s interest in language with the imagined worlds of their poetry. In the same exchange, he describes her work as revealing an unguessed-at other world, invoking the City of Is and its paradoxical imagery. The movement between an account of poetic craft and images of an alternative world suggests that language’s life lies partly in its power to make unfamiliar realities thinkable, not simply in its formal metre or its usefulness as argument.

The phrase also gathers significance across the correspondence. Ash remembers it as the point at which LaMotte’s wish to write a long poem on Melusina became clear to him, and he treats her formulation as a distinctive expression of her poetic convictions. Its recurrence turns a brief phrase into a touchstone for their discussions: language is not merely a vehicle carrying a pre-existing message, but a living medium whose possibilities poetry serves and reveals.