Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is

“Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.” Thus spoke Paul Engle, and in these words he revealed the secret alchemy of the poet’s craft. For the language of the marketplace and the hearth, of mothers and merchants, of lovers and laborers, is not cast aside by poetry—it is exalted. It is the same clay, but in the hands of the poet it is fired into something imperishable. The ordinary becomes luminous, the common tongue becomes a vessel for eternity, and what was simple speech is raised to a power that shakes the human soul.

Engle tells us that poetry is not mere ornament, not idle decoration. It is boned with ideas—its frame is the architecture of thought. Without bones, the body collapses; without ideas, verse dissolves into nothing but sound. Yet thought alone is not enough, for ideas without spirit are hollow. Thus poetry is also nerved and blooded with emotions—alive, quickened with the pulse of the heart, trembling with joy, sorrow, fury, or love. And all this, the mind and the heart entwined, is clothed in the skin of words: delicate, for a single misplaced phrase can wound the whole, and yet tough, for words endure across centuries when marble crumbles and kingdoms fall.

The ancients lived by this truth. Think of Sappho, whose fragments still burn across two millennia. Her words were drawn from the simplest well of human speech—songs of love, longing, jealousy, and beauty. Yet in her lines, ordinary language was raised to the Nth power. With a phrase she could pierce the heart more deeply than the longest discourse. Her bones were ideas of love, her nerves the tremors of passion, her blood the pulse of living desire, her skin the fragile Greek tongue—and yet she is alive still, for poetry preserved her as no monument could.

Or recall the speeches of Winston Churchill in the darkest hours of the twentieth century. He did not conjure new words unknown to the English tongue; he spoke the same syllables as any man in the street. But he raised them “to the Nth power.” When he said, “We shall fight on the beaches… we shall never surrender,” his words were boned with the idea of defiance, nerved and blooded with emotion, and wrapped in the skin of words strong enough to rally a nation. In that moment, his language was no longer ordinary. It was poetry, and it changed the fate of the world.

So we see that poetry is not confined to books or verses. It breathes wherever human speech is lifted by spirit. It is the rhythm of freedom cries, the lullaby of mothers, the prayers of saints, the slogans of revolution. Each carries ordinary syllables, yet when fused with idea and emotion, they transcend their lowly birth and take on immortal life. Poetry is not far away; it waits in every tongue. The poet’s task is only to raise it, to set it ablaze.

The lesson for us is clear: do not despise the ordinary. Within the common words you speak each day lies the seed of poetry. Your task is not to invent alien tongues but to take what you have, and lift it higher. If you write, let your sentences be strong with thought and alive with feeling. If you speak, let your words carry truth clothed in beauty. And if you live, let your life itself become a poem—structured with ideas, moved by emotions, spoken through actions that endure like words upon the wind.

Therefore, children of tomorrow, remember Paul Engle’s wisdom. Every phrase you utter may be a stone, or it may be a jewel. Choose to speak as poets, raising the common into the eternal. Temper your speech with clarity of thought, charge it with the fire of feeling, and bind it in the garment of words chosen with care. For then you will not only communicate—you will crown your language with power. You will wield the gift of poetry, the oldest and noblest crown of humankind.