“We all agree that the poetic speech is pre-eminently terse and condensed, a product of continuous distillations, in order to maintain what is essential and crucial, what will then be able to transmit the intensity of the aesthetic emotion. Thus, from the outset, the poem should (or at least try to) work on its material with extreme economy avoiding rhetoric, verbose analysis and description, traits that would transform it into a prose narration and thus weaken it. Verbal restraint, then, the prudent use of speech, is what makes poetry akin to silence, through the rejection of any unnecessary reference and its replacement by allusion and epigrammatism.

But as there is the art of speech, I would say that there is also an art of silence, even sui generis. Condensation and brevity also have their limits that, when exceeded, create the same or greater problems with lyrical chatter. When the speech shrinks to the point of dehydration, it becomes a hermetic and autistic speech, inaccessible to the reader to whom it is supposed to be addressed. Like Apollo who, through the priestess Pythia, spoke telegraphically and parabolically, so poetry “neither says nor hides, but means”. And if “neither says” is generally accepted, as an avoidance of verbosity, I think it’s “nor hides” that rather needs more attention, so that the poem does not stubbornly keep its meaning (the “signified” of semiotics) immersed in the darkness of inconceivability, but transmits it, in a “signifying” way and by aesthetic means, to the reader.“ aici