I’m glad Alan Jacobs put a link to Wendell Berry’s “Standing by words” (1980-81) on his blog. I don’t know Berry’s work at all, really, and have been catching up as I can since the news of his death. These lines, ones Jacobs quotes, caught me too:

“glibness is an inescapable doom of language without standards. One of the great practical uses of the literary disciplines, of course, is to resist glibness — to slow language down and make it thoughtful. This accounts, particularly, for the influence of verse, in its formal aspect, within the dynamics of the growth of language: verse checks the merely impulsive flow of speech, subjects it to another pulse, to measure, to extra-linguistic consideration; by inducing the hesitations of difficulty, it admits into language the influence of the Muse and of musing.”