Yes, we can say that poetry is one of the best examples of language—especially when we’re thinking in psychoanalytic or philosophical terms, where language isn’t just about communication, but about truth, desire, and jouissance.
In this sense:
• For Lacan, poetry comes closest to lalangue—that strange zone where the signifier detaches from fixed meaning and starts to resonate with sound, affect, and bodily enjoyment. A poem makes language stutter, shimmer, and slide. It reveals how meaning always fails—and yet something true gets said through that failure.
• For Heidegger, poetry discloses Being—it “lets things be” and opens a clearing where the unsayable begins to speak.
• For Freud, slips, dreams, and symptoms are already “poetic” productions of the unconscious. So poetry, which bends and folds language, mimics the mechanisms of the unconscious itself.
• For Deleuze and Guattari, poetry (especially in modernism) breaks the chains of dominant signification, releasing new intensities, new flows—like in Artaud, Michaux, or Rimbaud.
So yes: poetry is where language reveals rather than hides its limit, its excess, its Real. That’s why Lacan once said:
“All speech, all discourse, is a kind of poetry.”
Would you like a few poetic lines that exemplify this—maybe from Joyce, Celan, or a haiku?
