Language is a highly conventional enterprise. But unusual usages are, nonetheless, frequently encountered. Some of these novelties fall flat, while others find favour to the extent of entering common usage. He considered to say something will sound wrong to most speakers, while The military disappeared her husband is now acceptable English. In a compelling, recent monograph (2019), linguist Adelle E. Goldberg has argued that the language community is surprisingly open to new words and phrasings, provided we have no alternative way “to say it.” My paper argues that there is in fact a strong parallel between how the language community, faced with new usages, judges linguistic innovation, and the ways poets and critics judge innovative expressions and/or ideas in lines of poetry. This has consequences for how we theorise art’s relation to rules, more generally.

Paul Magee is Professor of Poetry at the University of Canberra, where he directs the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research. His most recent book is Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022).