Did poetry evolve from every language, or was there one language

Poetry is as natural an expression of pure human thought one can find outside of the works of Joyce. To an extent, it might even be thought of as partly prelinguistic.

Kind of related: Epic Greek was created as a poetic language.

A poet I'm not very fond of said that poetry is what is lost in translation. I agree with this for the same reason I disagree with the people who say that we think in language. Poetry is what is lost in translation as it's generally what can't be said. Another anon said prelingusitic, just from experience, I agree.

The best theory of poetry I've seen has depicted it as a natural outgrowth of language's ability to extend meanings through allegory and metaphor and stuff. Bachelard has some good stuff on this, somewhere, something about whole sentences or otherwise complex phrases being irreducible to "logical" or "plain." The metaphor itself carries distinct information, it IS distinct information. There is no such thing as "plain language." Ricoeur too. I think there's a good book called something like "On Metaphor," with essays by Max Black and others in it. Also Frege on sense and reference, which is a whole ambiguous thing.

There's a good passage somewhere in Wittgenstein or maybe Peter Winch talking about Wittgenstein, where he says that language naturally extends its meaning without having to "plan it out." So, say you're a human, in the early days of some language, and you have the word (say) "crisp," as in something fresh, zesty, springy and full of life, etc. And it suddenly strikes you that a speech a friend gave at a recent event was "crisp." You don't plan this out - your mind extends the concept naturally, there is something distinctly crisp about the speech. Since this is speech, i.e., it's mediated between human beings, if you say "damn, that speech was crisp" to another friend, he might say "nigga how the fuck can a speech be crisp?" but more likely he will immediately get what you mean, and then the language has been changed.

Poetic language probably functions in much the same ways. You're not just finding obtuse allegorical ways to describe "what is really happening." You are in some way capturing the real essence of what's happening, in a way that is immediately intelligible to the listener. For example
>The plane SHOT across the sky
is immediately intelligible even if you've never heard the verb "shoot" used of a plane before.

Concatenate and layer this enough and you'd probably get something like poetry in any culture. Or maybe some cultures don't have distinct "poetry," but they're still using this mechanism, maybe in ways that are much less sectioned-off into a specifically poetic practice or profession than how we do it.

>>8988959
Thank you anon. I'll definitely check these essays out.

>>8988959
Good post.

Academia will tell you it all came out of africa