But at the same time, you are stuck with lan­guage, and you arc stuck with words, and you are stuck with the things that you know. It’s a very nice thing, and a very dif­fi­cult thing. The more you know, the more lan­guages you know, the more buil­ding blocks the Martians have to play with. It’s har­der, too, because an une­du­ca­ted per­son often can write a bet­ter poem than an edu­ca­ted per­son, sim­ply because there are only so many buil­ding blocks, so many ways of arran­ging them, and after that, you’re through. I mean, the thing behind you is through. And it can make for sim­pli­ci­ty, as in good bal­lads, American and English. In the long run, it can make for real­ly just good poe­try. And some­times for great poe­try, an infi­ni­te­ly small voca­bu­la­ry is what you want. Perhaps that would be the ideal, except for the fact that it’s pret­ty hard to write a poem that way.