Poetry and the limits of language

This essay argues that poetic language offers the possibility of meaning and value, and simultaneously points beyond itself, to the limits of language, to a space differently configured as erasure, silence, the unsignifiable. What does it suggest, epistemologically and ontologically, if we acknowledge this double action of poetic language? What might this space beyond language be, and what difference does it make if we acknowledge this space? The essay examines four poems and the different ways in which they acknowledge such a space, drawing on the historically distinct approaches of Meister Eckhart and Jacques Derrida in order to ask what the space beyond language might be. The argument of the essay is that in acknowledging such a space something opens up for writers and readers of poetry: a different approach to knowing, and a potentially humbled ontological position.