It is strangely affecting to see people’s lips moving as they sit silently reading to themselves. Apparently, when we read we can’t help but imagine speaking. Even silent reading has its life in the body: seeing words, the part of our brain that governs speech starts working. When we read poetry silently to ourselves, is it our own voice or the poet’s voice that we hear?

Alone, we do not think in prose, but through an associative sequence of perceptions, images, memories and desires. For that reason poetry, which renews itself with each new line, probably comes closest to the structure of thought. Reading poetry, we take it over as though speaking to ourselves – only with a new lucidity and range. But when we hear a poet reading, the poem is repossessed. It becomes social; and can make us feel that we are hearing in society the language of our inwardness.